Cats, charts, and politics
Lately, Charlie's favorite place has been under the bushes in our front yard. He'll curl up there and then, when you open the front door, he'll come careening out and into the house.
Maybe someday I'll have the foresight to capture a video of this. In the meantime, here's a photo of Charlie just before he burrows into his hidey hole.
This doesn't really make much sense:
January came in with slower wage growth than in December. But if we added a gazillion jobs and sent the unemployment rate even lower, why did wage growth slow? In theory, workers have more leverage and should be demanding higher wages.
Theory seems to have a real problem at the moment. Or maybe the explanation lies here:
Employers aren't raising hourly rates much, but they are increasing the number of hours of work. As you can see, this means that weekly wages jumped considerably.
I have no idea how theory accounts for this. I will await commentary from economists, though I don't expect they'll provide any kind of consensus. They never do these days.
POSTSCRIPT: These numbers are not adjusted for inflation. We don't have inflation numbers for January yet, and the wage growth rate is very, very sensitive to even small changes in the inflation rate. In normal times I could plug in an estimate and probably be pretty close, but these aren't normal times.
The jobs report came out today and it was spectacular: We gained 517,000 jobs in January, which comes to 427,000 jobs after accounting for population growth. The unemployment rate went down to 3.4%, the lowest it's been in my lifetime. Here's the basic chart:
Here's a different one:
I've noted before that the employment level—a slightly different measure of employment—showed virtually no growth in 2022. This made me wonder how many jobs we've really added.
Well, in December the employment level increased by 700,000 jobs and in January it increased by another 900,000 jobs. It's still well below the headline number, but it sure made up a lot of ground.
If you believe the headline number, we've added 4 million jobs in the past 12 months. If you believe the employment level, we've added 2.5 million. That's a big difference to reconcile.
However, both surveys showed a big jump in January and the unemployment rate kept falling even though it was already at historic lows. This is great for workers, but unfortunately it will probably convince the Fed that the labor market remains hot and the economy requires further tightening.
This jobs number will also drive economists nuts. In theory, if the labor market is getting ever tighter, inflation should be going up. But instead it's going down. What happened to the Phillips curve?!?
One possible answer is: Just wait, pretty soon inflation is going to surge.
A second possible answer is: Over the past three years the economy has been entirely artificial, driven mostly by the effects of the pandemic and government responses to it. The Phillips curve just doesn't work in circumstances like this.
I'm on Team Artificial, and we'll find out if that's right sometime later this year.
Boris Johnson, during a visit to Washington DC yesterday, said he was "appalled to discover just how many people are afraid and frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson." Over at National Review, Bobby Miller gives him high-fives:
Johnson’s concerns are justified. Because of his large viewership and ability to whip up anger against anybody who crosses swords with him, Carlson wields tremendous influence among Republicans. There’s a contingent of Republicans who are eager to get into his good graces by taking positions that will generate appearances and favorable coverage on his show. There are also those who may oppose his populist and non-interventionist vision, who nonetheless walk on egg shells when it comes to any discussion of him. Republicans should be more willing to say what they think, without fear of whether they end up in Carlson’s crosshairs.
Both Johnson and Miller act vaguely surprised about this. Maybe they could use a history lesson.
Before the late '80s, there was really no choice except print if you wanted to get a daily dollop of right-wing opinion. That meant George Will and William F. Buckley and a bunch of other hyper-educated conservative elites, none of whom really appealed to the common man.
But the demise of the fairness doctrine upended the airways, and later on cable news became a staple. When that happened, everything changed.
First up was Rush Limbaugh. Maybe no one really remembers it now, but he was completely nuts! It was all feminazis and Billary and Vince Foster—and the common man loved it.
But Limbaugh needed the Clintons as foils and lost some of his mojo when they left the White House. The 9/11 attacks opened up new opportunities, and the Fox News prime-time trio of Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Bill O'Reilly seized it by upping the outrage—and the common man loved it.
Eventually 9/11 faded and Iraq turned into an unpopular debacle. Then Barack Obama took office and that demanded a whole new level of outrage. The old Fox News gang didn't seem quite suited to the era of the tea partiers, so Glenn Beck took over. He was so deranged he made the rest of them seem like Ivy League scholars—and the common man begged for more.
Glenn couldn't keep up the craziness forever, so he quit. Up stepped Andrew Breitbart, whose website was willing to go where even the lunatics hadn't dared tread before—and the common man was ecstatic.
But Breitbart died and times changed. Tucker Carlson, shrewd and calculating man that he is, decided there was a vacuum to fill. The way to fill it, as usual, was by dialing up the outrage yet again, so that's what he did—and the common man loved it even more than ever.
In other words, Boris and Bobby, this is nothing new. People like you created, nurtured, and apologized for these folks. Every few years they'd get ever louder and ever more dangerous, and you went along with it because it brought in votes. Tucker Carlson is just the latest version of this and he's your creation. So please don't look all doe-eyed while you're pretending to be shocked at the influence the lunatic fringe has. It doesn't become you.
Here's a fun picture. I was snapping away at a hummingbird outside my window and happened to catch it shaking its head the way a dog does to shake off water. In this split second its gorget has swung into the sunlight and is partially obscuring its beak.
BY THE WAY: This picture is a good example of how bird coloring works. As everyone has been telling me since my Tuesday pictures of the bluebird, feathers are sort of like miniature prisms that reflect different colors depending on exactly how the light hits them. This hummingbird's gorget, for example, can look black, brown, or bright orange depending on how the sun hits it. I was lucky that I happened to snap the shutter during the split second that the reflection was bright orange.
Ramenda Cyrus writes in the American Prospect this month that replacing lead water pipes is a problem:
Lead service lines have been a major public-health concern, one that became especially salient during the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. President Biden has repeatedly promised to replace all lead service lines in the country, a promise that became part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was passed in 2021.
....The work of replacing these lines falls to water agencies like Denver Water, which face a fundamental challenge. Water agencies can only replace the lines they own; the rest of the responsibility falls on private owners, many of whom are less than keen given the logistics.
Quick summary: water agencies don't own the service lines going into homes. There aren't good records of where all those service lines are. And replacing them all is hideously expensive.
I think my anti-lead bona fides are pretty good, but I'm not thrilled with this approach. For starters, most lead service lines are fine. At the very least we should focus on testing water in homes and replacing pipes only if the lead levels are high.
That would save a huge amount of money that could be put to a better use: soil remediation. For decades cars spewed out lead from their exhausts, and because lead is heavy it dropped straight down into the soil. Every summer, when temperatures go up, that lead gets kicked up into the atmosphere and resettles. Little kids play in the soil and then—because they're little kids—stick their fingers in their mouths and end up with lead in their system.
This is, once again, something that should be approached by measurement. There's no need to remediate all the soil in the country, just the parts that are most contaminated by lead. Doing this would probably do more for overall lead levels in children than any amount of water pipe replacement.
This two-pronged approach should guide our lead remediation efforts. The first prong is diversity: instead of focusing solely on lead pipes, look at pipes, soil, and anything else that contributes to lead poisoning in children. The second prong is measurement: map out where the lead is and work on the worst areas first. This will cost less and do more good than a monomaniacal focus on water pipes that's mostly based on a complete misunderstanding of what happened in Flint.
This is hardly an original suggestion on my part. It's the approach that most lead experts would recommend. So why aren't we doing it?
There are those who say that the single most important economic indicator is labor productivity. In the long run, increasing the amount of stuff each worker can produce is the key to economic growth—and that includes wages, GDP, corporate profits, and everything else.
Here's the latest reading on labor productivity:
There was a big jump in productivity at the start of the pandemic because lots of people got furloughed but output stayed relatively high. After a couple of quarters it flattened out but stayed considerably higher than the pre-pandemic trend. In the most recent quarter productivity rose a bit, putting us at almost exactly the same level as mid-2020. It's still above trend, but growth over the past couple of years has been zero.
But let's zoom in to those years and look at the growth rate of productivity:
Productivity growth is a very noisy series, so the trendline is less informative than it is for some other things. Nevertheless, the productivity growth rate was a solid 3.0% last quarter and the growth trend has picked up over the past year. That's good news.
Harold Pollack, author of the personal finance index card, offers up an index card approach to computer security:
I have an issue with this. It's not that any of it is wrong per se, just that it's too complicated. Like it or not, the vast majority of computer users either can't or won't follow all these rules. They probably don't even understand most of them. As with so many things, you're stuck with a dilemma: should you write something that's correct but that no one will read, or something that's EZ to read but not entirely accurate?
It's a problem. For example, here's my version of Harold's card:
This is not the way I do things. If you're computer literate, it's probably not the way you do things either. But it's about a thousand percent better than most people's security, and it's easy enough that they might actually do it. Maybe.
In preparation for my leukopheresis in a couple of weeks, I had to go in on Monday and get about 30 blood tests done. It turns out I don't have syphilis! Or Hep C! Hooray!
More seriously, one of the 30 was the good old M-protein test. I've been off chemo for a month now, so I was curious to see how much my levels had increased:
How about that? We stopped the chemo and my levels went down. Not enough to matter, but I'm still surprised they didn't go up. In any case, it's good news.
After focusing on K-12 schools for a while, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided yesterday to train his guns on universities:
DeSantis, a Republican, took his most aggressive swing yet at the education establishment, announcing a proposed overhaul of the state’s higher education system that would eliminate what he called “ideological conformity.” If enacted, courses in Western civilization would be mandated, diversity and equity programs would be eliminated, and the protections of tenure would be reduced.
Hmmm. So DeSantis is going to attack "ideological conformity" by forcing every freshman to take a specific class about a specific culture. That doesn't really add up, does it?
The funny thing is that I support a World History requirement for freshmen—but it ought to be world history, not just white history. As for diversity programs, I've heard from a few people that some of them have indeed become counterproductive. Requiring faculty interviewees to explain how they'd address diversity, for example, seems like it's producing little more than annoying pro forma boilerplate these days. But that hardly means all diversity programs need to be killed off.
In any case, it seems clear that DeSantis is mostly just preening for the MAGA vote. He's not opposed to ideological conformity, he just wants college students to be indoctrinated in his ideology.