Month: September 2022

Yesterday, the attorney general of Texas—the top law enforcement officer in the state—made an idiot of himself trying to avoid a process server who was delivering a subpoena for a federal court hearing today. Ernesto Martin Herrera, the process server, tells the story. Be sure to read to the end.

When Herrera arrived at Ken Paxton’s home in McKinney on Monday morning, he told a woman who identified herself as Angela that he was trying to deliver legal documents to the attorney general. She told him that Paxton was on the phone and unable to come to the door. Herrera said he would wait.

Nearly an hour later, a black Chevrolet Tahoe pulled into the driveway, and 20 minutes after that, Ken Paxton exited the house.

“I walked up the driveway approaching Mr. Paxton and called him by his name. As soon as he saw me and heard me call his name out, he turned around and RAN back inside the house through the same door in the garage,” Herrera wrote in the sworn affidavit.

Angela Paxton then exited the house, got inside a Chevrolet truck in the driveway, started it and opened the doors. “A few minutes later I saw Mr. Paxton RAN from the door inside the garage towards the rear door behind the driver side,” Herrera wrote. “I approached the truck, and loudly called him by his name and stated that I had court documents for him. Mr. Paxton ignored me and kept heading for the truck.”

....On Twitter, the attorney general said his sudden departure was motivated by concerns for his family's safety. “It’s clear that the media wants to drum up another controversy involving my work as Attorney General, so they’re attacking me for having the audacity to avoid a stranger lingering outside my home and showing concern about the safety and well-being of my family,” he wrote in a tweet.

The fact that Paxton ran from a process server is unremarkable. Lots of crooks run from process servers, and Paxton has been under indictment for securities fraud since 2015. Paxton probably thought that Herrera was trying to deliver documents related to that, and accepting them might actually cause his trial to finally start after years of delays.

Or they might have been documents related to whistleblower complaints of improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other crimes.

Or it might have been related to a different complaint from some of the whistleblowers, who claim that Paxton fired them in retaliation for blowing the whistle on him.

In other words, there are lots and lots of crimes these documents might have been about. How was Paxton to know that they were just innocent subpoenas to testify in a case about abortion law? Of course he ran.

Oh, and about that final paragraph of the Texas Tribune story. Gotta love it, right? It's as good as Trump himself could have pulled off.

Which of these headlines seems more informative to you?

The top one just gives you a number with no context. Is it a big number? A small one? Is it for one year? How does it compare to the rest of the budget?

The other two headlines give you context: the loan program will amount to about ¼% of the total federal budget and will increase the annual deficit by 1-2%. That's enough to give you some idea of whether you think it's worth it or not.

So why did the New York Times run the top headline? As it happens, this is a 30-year estimate, and averages about $15 billion per year compared to a total federal budget of about $6 trillion. But you wouldn't know this unless you already know how big the budget is, how big the deficit is, and how it changes over time. But how many people know that? Even I had to look it up.

So why not skip the meaningless big numbers and write headlines and stories that provide context for this stuff? The easiest way is to use simple percentages, but there are other ways too. All of them are better than the big meaningless number.¹

¹Or, hereafter, BMN.

I've been off my chemo regimen for the past six weeks, but it doesn't seem to have done me any harm:

The last time I was tested was four weeks ago. Since then, I've gone from 0.76 to 0.79. That's nothing. And in this case, no news is good news.

Now that I'm back on the waiting list for the CAR-T treatment, I'll also be getting back to my old chemo regimen until they find a Carvykti slot for me. Unfortunately, that also means getting back on the Evil Dex. But the reason that's unfortunate is a little different than usual and has nothing to do with my sleep, which is already so disrupted that I'm not sure the dex will have much effect.

No, the reason it's unfortunate is that long-term use of dex raises your A1C level and makes you diabetic. I asked my doctor to run an A1C test last week as long as we were checking a bunch of other stuff, and after six weeks off the dex (and a modest diet change over the past few months) my A1C has declined from 10.6 to 6.4. Hooray! I'm sure it will go back up when I start taking the dex again, but this result suggests that it will go down considerably when I finally get the CAR-T treatment and (cross your fingers) am off the dex for good.

And when will that be? No one knows. Probably another 2-4 months.

I learned today that the average net worth of a household in the bottom 50% set a record last quarter of $67,000. That's good to hear.

Except for one thing: Total net worth for all households has gone up 7x since 1990. So a record doesn't mean much unless that record is at least 7x the level in 1990.

It isn't. All that's happening right now is that net worth at the bottom is slowly making up for its long slide since 1990 followed by its disastrous plummet during the Great Recession. But even after 30 years, it still hasn't:

The share of total net worth owned by the bottom half of households has gone down 16% since 1990. Likewise, the share owned by the middle 49% has gone down 11%.

And the top 1%? I don't even have to tell you, do I? Its share has gone up 36%.

The post-Reagan era has been pretty disastrous for the working poor, the working class, and the middle class, and it's been OK for the upper middle class. But it's been truly spectacular for the rich.

And yet many folks in the working and middle classes still tell pollsters they trust Republicans more than Democrats to run the economy. Why? It is a mystery.

I took this picture in Bayeux, home of the Bayeux Tapestry. It's nothing special, but I like its pristine serenity. While I'm looking at it, I can believe for a few moments that there's nothing wrong with the world.

You heard it here first, but now the Wall Street Journal confirms it:

August apartment asking rents nationally fell 0.1% from July, according to a report from property data company CoStar Group. It was the first monthly decline in rent since December 2020, the company said.

Other surveys also showed rent declines of various degrees. Apartment-listing website Rent.com showed a 2.8% decrease in rent for one-bedroom apartments during the same month. A third measure, by the listings website Realtor.com, also noted a slight monthly decline in rent this August.

Not only has rent inflation peaked and then declined, it's now negative. We are experiencing rent deflation.

As usual, don't get too worked up about a single month's data. Still, the fact that rent inflation has been close to zero, whether negative or not, is yet another sign that inflation peaked at the beginning of the year and has been declining ever since.

The Washington Post tells the story today of Tom and Acey Hofflander:

Amid a national shortage of home-care workers that deepened during the covid-19 pandemic, the couple spent much of this year on a private agency list waiting to be assigned a professional home-care aide. But over four months, from April to August, no aides were available, leaving Acey to carry the load on her own.

....The shortage predates the pandemic but has been exacerbated by it, according to industry and government experts....“Fast food is trying to find workers and retail is trying to find workers and they are all trying to pull from the same labor pool,” said Kezia Scales, senior director of policy research at PHI.

As I'm sure you know, this kind of story is like catnip to me. Is there really a shortage of home health care workers? Did it get worse during the pandemic? Here's what the Bureau of Labor Statistics has to say:

The Post has it right: The number of workers, which was probably already insufficient, crashed by 100,000 at the start of the pandemic and has never caught up.

But you know what's coming next, don't you? Here's how much we pay these folks:

Pay went up at the start of the pandemic, but then slipped back down afterward. It's now less than it was in 2007. And even this overstates things, since it includes all home health care workers, including registered nurses and other specialists. For ordinary unskilled aides, pay is more in the range of $15—which ought to sound familiar.

Sure enough, the quote from Kezia Scales in the Post story says it all: we're pulling home health care workers from the pool of fast food workers. If that's what we think of the job, is it any wonder that we can't find enough of them?

The only way this gets better is if we pay home health care workers considerably more than we do now. But of course lots of people can't afford that. And that's why this is ultimately a Medicare problem: we desperately need to make long-term nursing care part of Medicare, and we need to pay workers more if we want to attract higher quality folks. This would be expensive, but it's inevitable that it will happen someday. The sooner we accept that the better.

I guess I'll never understand totalitarian regimes:

Officials in Russian-occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine were forcing people to vote “under a gun barrel,” residents said on Saturday as staged referendums — intended to validate Moscow’s annexation of the territory it occupies — entered their second day.

What's the point of this? Everyone knows what's going on, and Moscow is hardly even making an attempt to pretend the referendums are real. Should we take it as good news that even a thug like Vladimir Putin feels like he has to at least symbolically carry out the norms of democracy?

This is our local squirrel pretending to be a miniature beaver. I will let you know if he starts making miniature twig dams when we water the yard.

Having written a technical preface a couple of days ago, it's now time to write a review of Brad DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia. I'd like to keep this tolerably short, but even as I type these words I know that's not in the cards. Don't say you weren't warned.

OK then. Roughly speaking, I'd say there are two main themes in STU:

• The year 1870 is a breakpoint in human history thanks to the development of globalization, modern corporations, and industrial research labs. Because of these things, it's the first time that the world—or, more precisely, the northern half of the world—broke out of its Malthusian trap and began to provide permanently higher incomes to common workers. (I am skeptical of this for reasons I outlined at length in the preface.)
• The economic history of the "long 20th century" from 1870-2010 was primarily a contest between free-market capitalism, which produced growth but not an equitable distribution of goodies, and the welfare state, which interfered with the efficiency of the market but allowed everyone to benefit from technological progress.

First things first: purely as an economic history, this is a wonderful and engaging book. I didn't learn a lot that I didn't already know, but a large part of that is because I've been reading Brad's stuff for 20 years. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it again all in one place.

But I had a problem with it. I explained in the technical preface that I didn't buy the notion that 1870 was special per se. Rather, it just happened to be the point on the growth curve of the Britain-led Industrial Revolution that produced per capita GDP high enough to start trickling down to everyone.

Nor did 1870 represent a sudden outbreak of new inventions. Here's a brief list of 19th century inventions and ideas:

• High-pressure steam engine
• Steamboats
• Steam locomotives
• Canal networks
• Telegraph
• Rifle/revolver
• Electric motor/generator/dynamo
• Vulcanized rubber
• Portland cement
• Colonialism — I'm thinking here not of the necessarily limited coastal version but of the brutal extractive version that dominated the second half of the 19th century.
• Modern fractional reserve banking
• Steel-hulled steamships
• McCormick reaper
• Sewing machine
• Bessemer process
• Limited liability companies
• Safety elevator/skyscrapers
• Progress — by which I mean the idea that not only should we expect technological progress, we should actively promote it. Manifestations of this are things like patent offices, industrial labs, and research universities.
• Internal combustion engine
• Mail order catalogs
• Telephone
• Light bulb
• Public health improvements
• Automobile
• AC electricity grid

These things span the entire 19th century. Some are ordinary physical inventions (steamships, light bulbs) while others are ideas or organizational improvements (progress, capitalism). Some have specific invention dates, while others developed steadily over long periods. But nothing about this list suggests any kind of sudden surge around 1870.

Does this really matter? It does. The whole concept of 1870 being special is surprisingly central to Brad's larger thesis. His contention—and I hope I'm being fair here—is that the miraculous growth which started in 1870 opened up the doors to utopia (thus the title of the book). That is, it suddenly became possible to envision a future in which every one of us was literally awash in the products of our factories and laboratories. All we had to do was follow a simple path that was now clearly marked out for us.

But we blew it. There was World War I. Then the Great Depression. And World War II. Then the "Glorious 30 Years" of fabulous growth, but followed by the neoliberal turn in which ordinary workers were once again cannon fodder for the rich. And all along we failed to include the global south in our growth revolution. Finally, the Great Recession of 2010 exposed our financial system as a lie, and in 2016 the election of Donald Trump showed that ordinary workers were fed up and no longer believed the lie.

That sounds pretty discouraging. But what if 1870 isn't special? What if it's just another year in a long period of human progress—unprecedented progress, to be sure, but a long, continual period nonetheless? If that's the case, then there's no reason to view it as a turning point and no reason to think that human nature should change just because we all got steadily richer. In other words, we didn't blow it. We just did what h. sapiens does and always has done.

As Brad knows well, because he's written similar things frequently, we humans are just overclocked primates. We have developed a thin layer of cognition that allows us to gossip more effectively and solve differential equations on request, but that thin layer lives on top of millions of years of primate evolution. And we are still bound by it. In particular:

We are territorial.
We are patriarchal.
We are hierarchical.
We are addicted to dominance displays.
We are tribal.

So just as always, after 1870 we continued to have stupid wars. We continued to base our social structures on racism and tribalism. We continued to be seduced by charismatic (male) leaders. We continued to do stupid things just to show that we couldn't be pushed around.

This is, perhaps counterintuitively, a more optimistic view of the world than Brad's. He thinks something should have changed in 1870 and he's disappointed that it didn't happen. His entire book, but especially the last few chapters, is clouded by despondence over the events of the past century and, especially, the past decade.

I, on the other hand, think that nothing special should have happened just because we got better at inventing things. And it didn't. We just continued on our sloppy way, complete with wars and exploitation and lynchings and occasionally lunatic political parties. Still, we've made progress on all these things. Not a lot, but what do you expect in only a few hundred years?

This is why, for example, I think that our current MAGA-inflected politics is a pothole, not a roadmap for the future. We'll get over it.

As for economics in general, you all know what I think: in another 20 or 30 years we will have cheap, genuine artificial intelligence. That will be a breakpoint in human history and will make all our current arguments moot. Practically any economic disagreement you can think of simply makes no sense in a world dominated by robots and AI.

But we should keep arguing anyway. After all, I might be wrong about AI.