Month: August 2022

This is a midnight picture taken from Les Halles of the Palais Royale with the moon rising behind it. The camera is obviously on full telephoto.

I was out with the tripod that night, which led to an unfortunate incident. A pair of Italian teenagers saw that I was taking a picture of la luna and eventually got across to me that they'd like a picture of them taken with their cell phone. That was no problem, but a group of drunken (?) partiers crashed the scene before I could snap a picture. They were likely harmless, but after they had milled around for a while I became concerned that one of them was going to run off with my camera, which was behind me on the tripod. I hurriedly gave the phone back to the Italians, picked up the camera, and headed off.

The Italians were upset when they looked at the camera and realized there was no picture of them. I don't blame them. But I'd do it again.

Ben Friedman is unhappy about the Washington Post's deep dive into President Biden's influence during the runup to the Ukraine war:

The Post just can't keep this kind of credibility voodoo / domino theory out of news stories.https://t.co/lFdlv17ji6 pic.twitter.com/7p8DFO5DGo

— Ben Friedman (@BH_Friedman) August 16, 2022

It's worth noting first that the Post story clearly says it was multiple things that had hurt US credibility with its allies. With its allies. This is very different from the usual criticism that US "weakness" emboldens our enemies.

Nonetheless, the Post does mention the Afghanistan withdrawal as something that generally hurt America's reputation for sticking things out and being a reliable partner in war. And this is ridiculous. The United States spent 20 years in Afghanistan, the majority of them during a period in which it was obvious to everyone that we had little chance of winning or even doing any real good. This is the kind of thing that burnishes your reputation for sticking things out.

In fact, it shows that the US is practically a crackpot when it comes to never admitting defeat. 20 years! It's hard to imagine. If Biden's withdrawal showed anything, it was simply that there are occasional presidents who aren't completely insane over the idea of the US losing its mythical credibility by recognizing facts on the ground and ending a war. Bush couldn't do it, Obama couldn't do it, and Trump couldn't do it (he said he was going to do it, but we don't know if he would have held firm under pressure and actually left Afghanistan if he'd won a second term). But Biden finally did it.

The rest of the world doesn't believe in this alleged issue of credibility. They believe that the United States acts in its own self interest. We enter wars if we think they're in our interest. We leave wars if we think that's in our interest. And everyone knows we have the power to make our threats good if we feel like it. We hardly have to prove that more often than we already do.

The Census Bureau reported today that housing starts dropped 10% in July. But that's a misleading number all by itself. Here it is broken into single-family homes vs. apartment buildings with five or more units:

Apartment buildings have been on an upward trend for more than a year and are up 3% since the beginning of 2022.

But single-family homes are a disaster. They've been declining since the end of last year and are down 21% since the beginning of 2022. It's obvious that home builders don't believe the market will continue to maintain its current level of high prices.

In other news, lots of big retailers are now groaning under the weight of inventory they can't sell:

Many retailers that had too little to offer during the early stages of the pandemic now have too much of everything....The resulting pileup of unsold goods forced many big national chains such as Walmart Inc. and Target Corp. to mark down merchandise this year, warning that profits would suffer. Luxury furniture retailer RH and grill maker Weber Inc. pulled their sales forecasts earlier this summer, saying demand had plunged for luxury furniture and outdoor grills. Mattress maker Sleep Number Corp. also began offering additional promotions this year after sales slowed.

After a year of demand outstripping supply, we now have widespread reports of supply outstripping demand. It's hard to see how core inflation can remain high under these conditions.

Here's our usual start-of-Tuesday post. Gasoline prices were down yet again last week from $4.04 to $3.94:

Adjusted for inflation, the price of gasoline is down 23% since its June peak. Hooray for President Biden!

Likewise, the price of oil was down a couple of bucks too. As of today, West Texas Intermediate is at $89 compared to its June peak of $122. That's a decline of 27%.

POSTSCRIPT: I plan to adopt the Trump/GOP policy for this chart. If gasoline prices start going up, I will no longer post it.

One of the most fascinating parts of Mar-a-Lago-gate, or whatever we're calling it, is why Trump left the White House with stacks of classified documents. I can think of lots of reasons, but none of them really make any sense:

• Trump just took anything he wanted to have around, refusing to admit to himself that they weren't "his" documents. That's all there was to it.
• He took the documents because he hoped to sell them to someone in some way.
• He wanted them because they were potentially useful as material to be leaked to the press.
• Everything was chaos in the final days of his administration and no one knew what boxes were being hauled out to the moving van. When the National Archives demanded much of it back, Trump grudgingly let them have some of it but dug in his heels at the rest because that's just what Trump does. He's a ten-year-old.
• Trump kept stuff that he wanted to eventually share with kinda-sorta-allies (e.g., Israel), people he personally considered allies (Putin), and regular old allies (Great Britain).

That's off the top of my head, and maybe I'm forgetting something obvious. But none of it strikes me as plausible aside from the general argument from idiocy and childish obstinacy. Anyone have any other ideas that seem genuinely likely?

In the Financial Times this weekend, Janan Ganesh is music to my ears:

This is as good a time as any to make a non-exhaustive list of things that I read in 2020 [which supposedly] had little future. Nightlife. The handshake. Buildings tall enough to need lifts. Casual sex (ha ha). Pret A Manger. The rat race. Business-class seats. Airbnb. I recount none of this in order to embarrass.

....The point is to draw lessons from their wrongness. One is that journalism has taken a neurotic turn over the past decade or so. It is there in the enthusiasm with which social maladies are talked up (the “loneliness epidemic”). It is there in the interior focus of so much feature writing.

....If you write on the regular, you have to play up the significance of transient events. “This little episode won’t change much, read 1,000 words on it”, is not a bad pitch. But it has to be rationed. The rest of the time, all the drive in media is to attribute significance to the ephemeral. Between 1997 and 2003, every other week was “Tony Blair’s worst week”. In 2020 — more forgivably, no doubt — the same impulse led to some dire futurology.

I have two points to make about this. First: duh. It was astonishing to count up the number of essays by alleged adults who insisted that millennia of human nature would be wiped out by a year or two of mild pandemic. Was this due to sweeping historical myopia? Ignorance of the power of social habits in primates? Wishful thinking about things the authors hoped would change? I don't know, but a lot of people ought to be giving this some serious thought.

Second: Ganesh acknowledges that one long-lasting change is remote work. I don't disagree with him, but I do wish there were some decent empirical evidence on this score. But nobody seems to have tracked this rigorously before the pandemic, and even after the pandemic we only get stuff like this:

Remote work has gone down from 35% at the start of the pandemic to 7.7% today. But this solely counts people who are working remotely because of COVID. It doesn't include the effect of workplaces that have changed their remote work policies more generally, even if the original impetus was COVID. At least, that's how I interpret this.

The truth is that outside the highly educated bubbles of the New York Times, progressive Twitter, and Silicon Valley, there's a lot of evidence that remote work is steadily fading away. But there's no firm evidence. It's hard to believe that some kind of consistent, semi-valid time series isn't available that covers the past 20 years or so, but that sure seems to be the case.

Scary times in Dana Point this weekend. As her father looked on frozen in terror, a little girl on a bodyboard was scrutinized by a hideous alien monster looking for a snack. In this high-resolution photo, you can even see the toxic venom dripping from its dreadful maw.

You will not see this in the mainstream media, of course, since the Deep State covers up all evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth. However, you'll be relieved to know that everything ended up OK. Moments after this picture was taken, the monster was distracted by a fish and flew over to dive bomb it. I guess it decided the little girl was a little too big for lunch.

Over the weekend Vox published about the millionth article informing us that our response to monkeypox is a total clusterfuck and bears an uncanny resemblance to our infamous COVID-19 clusterfuck.

Sure. Maybe. Generally speaking, though, I sometimes wonder how fast these newly-minted critics think a country should be able to roll out a massive testing and vaccine program for a new disease. But they never say. Nor do they ever hint at any real expertise in ground-level epidemiology and the obstacles it presents. The answers are just a vague faster and we're the richest country in the world for god's sake.

So here's the Vox piece:

Accurate data is critical for public health, and the US doesn’t have it. The US declared monkeypox a public health emergency this month, but the decision may have come too late....Reliable demographic information is key to making the right choices for allocating limited tests and vaccines.

All of this feels like an uncanny echo of the early mishandling of Covid-19....Reporting lags on rising cases meant that lockdowns began too late to save tens of thousands of lives. Similarly, certain communities uniquely at risk, like Black and Hispanic people who lacked access to health care, were suffering higher rates of severe illness and death from Covid before policymakers had any way of knowing where to direct public health outreach.

....The delays and poor coordination between clinics and city health departments meant that contact tracing happened too late to contain the spread. If the spread had been caught earlier, patients would have been more likely to minimize their risk and seek out testing and treatment if they were exposed, and there would have been more advance warning on ordering a vaccine supply.

First off, here are the numbers:

You'll notice that there are two lines for the United States. The bottom one is just the normal raw data. The top one is lagged by two weeks to account for the fact that our first case showed up about two weeks after the first case in Europe. I am doing this out of a monumental abundance of fairness.

But even using the lagged figure, the US is roughly in the middle of the pack. If our response was terrible, then just about everyone's response was terrible.

So this is Point One: You have to compare the US to the real world, not to some idealized response in a white paper. All of the countries in this chart are advanced economies and we did about as well or better than most of them.

Then there's Point Two: In the entire Vox article, contact tracing is mentioned precisely once. But this is the whole ballgame. All that testing and all that data we collect is primarily to support a vigorous program of contact tracing, especially in a case like this where we already knew early on who the most vulnerable community was (men who have sex with men).

And that's where everything falls apart: despite the heroic efforts of a small group of people, we're terrible at contact tracing and all the data in the world won't change that. What we need is (a) great data collection, (b) a large group of extremely well-trained people, (c) lots of funding, and (d) a population willing to answer the phone and provide intimate data to a government bureaucrat calling about a disease.

We have none of that. A few other peer countries do better, but most of them don't really have it either. And in the US, we have another obstacle: even if we were great at A, B, and C, we are possibly the world's worst at D. Not only that, but thanks to the Fox News paranoia machine we're probably worse on this score than we were before the COVID pandemic. Our monkeypox case rate is currently rising faster than in most peer countries, and the reason is most likely our collective unwillingness to embrace contact tracing as a way of life during pandemics.

So, yes, we should collect better data. We should coordinate local, state, and federal officials more efficiently. We should get this kind of thing up and running faster. We should pour money into it.

But it will never make more than a small difference as long as Americans are widely suspicious of contact tracing. That's our big problem, not a lack of funding or commitment or basic epidemiological expertise. The fault, my friends, lies in ourselves, not the CDC.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's another chart showing cumulative deaths from monkeypox:

That would be zero for every country on the chart, including the US. Keep this in mind as you evaluate the priority given to monkeypox by the medical community. During the period shown in the chart, 70,000 people in these countries died from COVID-19.

China's housing bubble is catching up to them:

A raft of data released Monday showed economic activity slowed across the board in July, including factory output, investment, consumer spending, youth hiring and real estate, highlighting the breadth of the economic challenge facing policy makers in a politically sensitive year for leader Xi Jinping, who is expected to break with recent precedent and seek a third term in power this fall.

This is on top of a longer term slowdown in economic growth:

China has a very uncertain future. Their demographics are bad; their dependence on low-value manufacturing is bad; their obsession with Taiwan is bad; and Xi Jinping's brand of nationalistic autocracy is bad.

On the other hand, their educational system is good and their dedication to economic growth is good. Those might be enough to make up for everything else. Maybe.

On its first anniversary, Doyle McManus writes about our withdrawal from Afghanistan:

It was Biden’s worst foreign policy failure, and prompted warnings that more catastrophes would follow: not only the tragedy of Taliban rule over 38 million Afghans, but a resurgence of international terrorism and a collapse of U.S. influence around the world.

Ah yes, Joe Biden's infamous "chaotic" withdrawal. I think we can all agree that the Taliban continues to be the appalling and thuggish group it's always been, but there was never any real argument about that in the first place. But how about everything else?

Terrorism? Contrary to pessimists’ fears, the Afghan-based core of Al Qaeda hasn’t succeeded in rebuilding.

....As for broader damage to U.S. credibility, reports of our demise appear to have been exaggerated....To Biden’s credit, he followed through, building international coalitions to counter China’s growing power....He also worked to assure NATO allies that the withdrawal from Afghanistan, where more than 50 other countries also sent troops, would not weaken the U.S. commitment to Europe.

Those relationships were tested within months, when Russia’s Vladimir Putin threatened to invade Ukraine. Biden and his aides took a leading role in organizing an allied response, including warnings that Western countries would impose joint economic sanctions on Russia if Putin launched an invasion.

To Putin’s apparent surprise, the NATO allies were serious. Even more surprisingly, the outbreak of war in Eastern Europe prompted Sweden and Finland to abandon their long-held status as neutral countries and apply hurriedly for membership in the U.S.-led alliance.

As McManus concludes, the fall of Kabul had "surprisingly modest" repercussions beyond Afghanistan itself:

A year later, Biden’s decision to withdraw, however disastrous it appeared at the time, looks more defensible.

Quite so. I would certainly like to hear a few others acknowledge this.