Cats, charts, and politics
All year long I kept hearing that labor unions were making a comeback in 2022. Apparently I was misled:
The good news, such as it is, is that the number of private sector union members went up by about 200,000. But that was only because the number of total workers went up. The unionization rate fell from 6.1% in 2021 to 6.0% in 2022.
Among public sector workers, the unionization rate fell from 33.9% to 33.1%.
Check out the latest numbers for PPI inflation:
PPI is basically inflation at the wholesale level: it's the price that domestic producers get for the initial sale of their products, and it's often a forerunner of consumer inflation.
As usual, I'm showing monthly inflation that's been annualized. Headline PPI came in at -5.8% and core PPI stood at +1.6%—well below the Fed target of 2%.
(If you insist on year-over-year figures—which you shouldn't—headline PPI in December was 6.2% and core PPI was 5.5%.)
This is good news, confirming the dramatic drop in inflation that we've already seen in both the CPI and PCE indexes. In a few more months inflation will seem like a mirage.
POSTSCRIPT: I've never noticed this before, but PPI is reported as a month-over-month number while CPI is reported as a year-over-year number. I don't know why.
This is from the "Things That Make You Go Hmmm" file. It's the pediment (?) of a building in Paris photographed from the Coulée Verte.
Don't think I understood how dramatic China's demographic shift was until I saw this graph.
Let's take a look. Here's the chart Brad is talking about:
That is indeed pretty startling. Then again, here's the same chart for the United States:
This isn't quite as startling, but it's not wildly different from the Chinese chart except for one thing: the stunning drop in Chinese births starting in 2018. In 2016, China abandoned its one-child policy and there was an immediate uptick in births, followed by a small downtick the next year. But then things went off the rails.
Birth rates might have recovered after that, but apparently Chinese couples had a massive reaction to COVID-19 and just stopped having babies. Birth rates dropped in the US too, but only by a small amount.
The result is that between 2017 and today (through 2021), births dropped about 5% in the US but by more than a third in China. Perhaps that will turn around in 2024 after China emerges from its COVID year.
Perhaps. If it doesn't, the Chinese workforce is going is to suddenly implode starting around 2038. But who knows? Maybe it won't matter by then.
POSTSCRIPT: This was a stunningly difficult post to write. The CDC provides an absolute mass of statistics on every subtopic of births and deaths you can imagine, but it's nearly impossible to get a simple table of crude births and deaths. It's only because of my dedication to you, my loyal readers, that I persevered and eventually cobbled together the US data.
I've been off the dex for a couple of weeks now, and this is mostly a Very Good Thing. Still, I used to schedule telescope activities for dex nights, which was pretty convenient since I needed to stay up all night and that's exactly what dex did.
So how would I do without the dex? Last night was my first test, and the answer is: Boy am I tired. Driving home at 4 am was no fun, and I flopped into bed as soon as I got home. Now I'm up, but my 64-year-old body is not happy at getting only two or three hours of sleep.
And that was only for a night at Palomar, which is relatively close to home. I don't think I could make the 3-hour drive home from the desert—not safely, anyway. I'm not sure yet what the solution is.
A Twitter reader reminded me of this righteous rant about the George Bush era from 2011:
Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.
But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it’s treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at.
Hell, I don't talk about this anymore either. So much unbelievable shit has swirled down the sewer since then that it really does seem a bit like a dreamscape. I dunno. Maybe it never happened. Anybody else remember this stuff or is it just me?
TSA announced today that it confiscated a record number of firearms at airport checkpoints in 2022. TSA discovered 6,542 firearms in 2022 compared to 5,972 in 2021.
But wait! There were a lot more people flying in 2022 than in 2021. Let's look at firearm confiscations per passenger:
So 2022 wasn't really a record, just an increase due to more people flying. In fact, the only interesting thing about this chart is the enormous uptick following the start of the pandemic in 2020.
At first you might think 2020 is a special case because air traffic plunged that year. But the firearm confiscation rate stayed high in 2021 and then dropped only a little bit in 2022.
You know what this reminds me of? Murder rates:
The only thing these two trendlines have in common is guns. Here's the number of firearm background checks conducted each year. It's generally considered a good proxy for the number of firearms sold:
Gun sales rose sharply in 2020. The murder rate rose sharply in 2020. TSA gun confiscations rose sharply in 2020. What other gun-related statistics might follow the same pattern?
Check out the smirk on this kid with his behind-the-back save in a ping pong game with his father. This picture was taken at a municipal ping pong table alongside the Saint-Martin Canal in Paris.
The congressional investigation of the January 6 insurrection is now over, and Republicans are obviously uninterested in continuing it. But the Washington Post reports that committee staffers collected loads of evidence about social media that never made it into the final report and is now hidden from public view:
The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee.... Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals.
....“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”
This matches pretty much all the public evidence we have about conservative dominance of social media, including Twitter. And there's this:
Some of what investigators uncovered in their interviews with employees of the platforms contradicts Republican claims that tech companies displayed a liberal bias in their moderation decisions....Twitter employees, they testified, could not even view the former president’s tweets in one of their key content moderation tools. “ … Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” said one former employee, who testified to the committee under the pseudonym J. Johnson.
I assume this was leaked to the Post by a staffer who would like to see their 122-page memo released to the public. That's obviously not going to happen as long as Republicans control the House, but it doesn't mean that it can't be leaked by someone who has a copy.
Maybe they'll leak it to me! I could become famous.
Alex Tabarrok and Robert Tucker Omberg have published a new paper which confirms a thought that's been rattling around in my head for a while. The thought is this: aside from vaccines, pretty much nothing has much effect on the spread of COVID-19.
As usual, I'll lead with a couple of charts. The first one measures excess deaths as a function of the quality of a country's health care system:
There should be a downward slope to the regression line, showing that better health care systems lead to fewer deaths. However, there isn't even a modest downward slope. There's a tiny upward slope. Richer, more competent countries had more excess deaths than poorer countries.
(Note that excess deaths is used here rather than reported COVID-19 deaths. This is because reported deaths are unreliable, especially in poorer countries. Excess deaths are easier to measure and more reliable.)
And now here's another chart:
These charts divide countries into four buckets by their level of preparedness for a pandemic, with the red line indicating the most prepared countries. Among all countries, the red line shows nothing special. When you zoom in on just rich countries, those represented by the red line did do better than the others—but not by an awful lot and mostly in the vaccine distribution year of 2021.
Nor did anything else studied by the authors make much difference:
Our primary finding is that almost no form of pandemic preparedness helped to ameliorate or shorten the pandemic. Compared to other countries, the United States did not perform poorly because of cultural values such as individualism, collectivism, selfishness, or lack of trust. General state capacity, as opposed to specific pandemic investments, is one of the few factors which appears to improve pandemic performance.
In other words, what's important is not so much preparedness as the willingness to take quick action. That willingness is found mostly in countries that have experienced a recent pandemic and are therefore on alert for a new one.
The authors draw two lessons from all this. First, instead of producing massive planning documents, which mostly fail, we should increase our use of everyday procedures such as routine genomic sequencing and monitoring of sewage discharge. These can give us early warning of a new virus. Second, we should focus our energies on anything that might speed up the development and deployment of vaccines. This is, by a long margin, the most effective way to fight a new pandemic virus.
My take on this is that it by no means tells us to give up and do nothing except develop vaccines. The world didn't respond well to COVID-19, but that doesn't mean we can never respond well to a pandemic. I have a dim view of human nature, but not that dim.
That said, the reason this has all been rolling around in my head is because of a single observation: Although some countries initially did better than others, eventually everyone had to relax. When that happens, you get your turn in the barrel. Here are death rates through the middle of 2021, before vaccines started to overwhelm other factors:
Southeast Asian countries did well because they were still paranoid from the SARS epidemic of a few years ago. Nordic countries did well for some mysterious reason that I don't think we yet understand.
Among other rich countries, there's a (very) rough division between large and small: Large countries generally had higher death rates than small countries. I can think of lots of reasons this could be true, and you should feel free to take a crack at it too. However, as far as I know there's no evidence for anything in particular.
POSTSCRIPT: This is a preliminary study and shouldn't be taken as the final word on anything. Also, like me, the authors might be biased in favor of the results they found. Take this as an opening salvo, but nothing more for now.