Month: October 2022

If Republicans were running things, about 10 million more of you wouldn't. Which 10 million? That's hard to say. Maybe you should ask a Republican which jobs they think are worth sacrificing on the altar of economics for the rich.

Until you get an answer, vote for a Democrat in November. We'll keep everyone working.

I have no special reason for posting this. It's just to remind everyone that, in the end, productivity growth is the single most important metric of economic prosperity and ours has been slowly declining in both the medium and long term. We should ask our presidential candidates what, if anything, they plan to do about this.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's something I've never understood about productivity growth: why is it so volatile? It's always struck me as something that ought to be fairly steady, especially if you remove recession years. But it's not. Why does it swing up and down so frenetically from year to year and even quarter to quarter?

Pelicans are generally big, ungainly, semi-comical creatures, but if you can catch them as they're dive bombing for lunch you can see their true selves. This is what nature intended for them.

We already knew this from other data, but Case-Shiller confirms that house prices are in free fall:

This is the Case-Shiller 20-City Composite index adjusted for inflation, and it shows that house prices plummeted at an annualized rate of 16% in August.¹ This is the third straight month of falling prices since housing fell off a cliff in May.

¹The National Home Price Index, without adjustment for inflation, was down at an annualized rate of 10% in August.

I was piddling around on the Department of Transportation website and came upon some numbers that surprised me. Here is the growth rate of various kinds of transit:

I was aware that public transit ridership had gone down during the pandemic, but I hadn't realized it was down so much and had stayed down so much.

Auto ridership never dipped at all except for very briefly at the very start of the pandemic. Air travel crashed almost completely but has since recovered. Public transit also collapsed but to this day is still 40% below its pre-pandemic number.

Before the pandemic, buses and subways carried about 800 million riders per month. That fell to 150 million at the start of the pandemic and has since recovered to about 500 million.

That's 300 million missing rides per month while auto travel has stayed flat. What happened to them all?

The Washington Post editorialized a couple of days ago about the explosion of local "newspapers" that are actually just hyperpartisan attack sites in disguise. Here's the fifth paragraph:

Stories are generated by robots and sometimes stuffed full of made-up quotes — a trend known as “pink-slime journalism.” The name is borrowed from a pasty meat byproduct added to ground beef sold in supermarkets to unsuspecting consumers. A tally of these websites by Columbia Journalism Review researcher Priyanjana Bengani found that hyperpartisan liberal “local news” sites were dwarfed by their conservative counterparts. The number is staggering: at least 1,100 sites through numerous networks run by at least five distinct corporate entities, in every state, all of them traceable through a confusing web of limited-liability companies to businessman Brian Timpone.

Why the fifth paragraph? Because for some reason the Post's first four paragraphs are all about fake liberal newspapers, even though by their own count there are 1,100 conservative versions of pink slime journalism and only 62 liberal versions. But if you just skimmed the first few paragraphs and then turned the page you'd never know this. You'd think it was an exclusively liberal phenomenon.

My old friend Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones, is also upset at this little drive-by shooting:

Apologists on both sides of the political spectrum argue that all outlets these days are biased, even when they don’t admit it — so what’s the difference? But the distinction is obvious. People know more or less what they’re getting when they tune in to Fox News or open up a copy of Mother Jones. These institutions’ primary purpose is to make money by putting out news, and they don’t profess in their very name to be independent.

I would be pretty careful about comparing a small, nonprofit magazine—or anything else, for that matter—to a massive, moneymaking juggernaut of outrage and fake news. It's true that the point here is simply that both outlets aren't pretending to be something they aren't, which is fair enough, but why not show a little more care and compare, say, Mother Jones and National Review? Or Fox News and MSNBC? Nobody who even tries to do honest journalism deserves to be in the same sentence as Rupert Murdoch's cancer on the soul of America.

Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister of Great Britain, apparently gets a lot of flak for marrying into great wealth:

Sunak, a former banker, and his wife, Indian tech heiress Akshata Murty, have an estimated fortune of about 730 million pounds ($830 million), according to the Sunday Times Rich List. On this year’s list, published before her death, Queen Elizabeth II was estimated to have about 370 million pounds ($420 million) by comparison.

....Sunak’s critics have sought to play up his privileged upbringing. They point out that he attended the 600-year-old Winchester College, where annual fees for those who board, like he did, today exceed $52,000.

$830 million? With an m? That's chump change. They can't possibly be getting worked up about supposed "wealth" that doesn't even reach ten figures, can they?

As for Winchester College, is that another joke? Hell, we probably have community colleges here in America that charge that much. Any university worth attending will charge 50 or 60 grand just in tuition.

The British used to understand wealth, but no longer. What a sad downfall for a once great nation.

This is the brand new location of the Orange County Museum of Art, formerly the Newport Harbor Art Museum, formerly the Balboa Pavilion Gallery. After a nearly 30-year planning and fundraising effort, the building has finally been completed and is now part of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

Thanks to a donation from a local jeweler, admission is free for the next ten years. The large iron monolith on the right is called "Connector," and was designed and built by Richard Serra.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has decided that Europe is likely to have a mild winter this year thanks to its third consecutive year of La Niña influence:

Partly because of this, and partly because Europe has been successful in refilling its natural gas reserves, the price of gas has plummeted over the past month:

Cross your fingers. But it looks like the Ukraine War will have a muted effect on European gas supplies and prices.

Tyler Cowen is not joking here:

It is not sufficiently remarked upon that many Democrats have an increasingly difficult time believing in democracy....To put it bluntly, many Democrats have arrived at the position that democracy works satisfactorily only when it delivers sufficiently low gas prices!

See my previous post, and also the new column by Krugman, ”Will Gas Prices Doom Democracy?” All rhetorical contortions notwithstanding, I don’t see how many current Democrats avoid an implicit or maybe even explicit super-charged skepticism about, yes, democracy.

This is absurd. Krugman is not writing about any personal loss of faith in democracy. He's warning that something dumb like high gasoline prices might lead to a Republican victory in November, which in turn would hand power over to a party that no longer believes in democracy.

When we talk about opposition to democracy, we're not talking about someone who dislikes the result of an election. There are 70 million of those every four years. We're not talking about someone who lacks faith in the intelligence of the American public. We're not even talking about someone who wants to pack the Supreme Court, as long as it's via legal and democratic means.

It's far worse than that. We're talking about people who storm the Capitol to prevent Congress from validating the result of a presidential election. We're talking about people who lead campaigns of intimidation against poll workers and election supervisors so that they'll quit and can be replaced with partisan cronies who will rig things in their favor. We're talking about the politicians who pass laws to make this easier to do. And we're talking about demagogues who stoke the fires of trust in elections with endless charges that the other party is cheating and deserves whatever it gets in return.

Apologies for the earnestness, but this isn't something to snark about. It's deadly serious and it's not a both-sides issue—not for now, at least.