Cats, charts, and politics
They're so adorable when they're sprawled out, taking a nap together.
I'm not really sure where the odd coloring came from in this picture. I shot it using my flash unit, but for some reason the flash malfunctioned and provided much less light than it should have. When I corrected it in Photoshop, I ended up with red and lemon-yellow highlights from the nearby lamp. That's never happened before.
Peggy Noonan has a remarkable column in the Wall Street Journal today about the COVID lab-leak theory. Before I get to that, though, let's review why we're talking about this at all. A few days ago the Journal reported that:
I believe this is a fair summary of what happened, and it doesn't strike me as something that should push your beliefs very hard in one direction or another.
Now let's return to Noonan. She writes today that "common sense" suggests COVID was leaked from a lab. After all, it originated in a city with an important biological lab. I won't deny that this is provocative, but it's not remotely conclusive to any reasonable person. Noonan sort of admits that, but then says she and other conservatives got increasingly suspicious because experts were all working so hard to debunk the lab-leak hypothesis:
Why were so many others, not in the government but on social media and in the professions, so invested in the idea that the origin had nothing to do with a lab? Part of it was knee-jerk partisan thinking: Our political opposites think it happened in a Chinese lab because they’re xenophobic. Others were thinking diplomatically: Why increase tensions with China when there are already more than enough? Some were thinking practically: If China gets defensive, it’ll only withhold more data just when we need it most. Others appeared mysteriously uninterested in the lab-leak theory because, as we now know, there was something to hide: U.S. funding of the Wuhan lab. The National Institutes of Health admitted in October 2021 that it funded research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This is quite a list, but Noonan manages to miss the most important possibility: Experts were invested in the idea that the origin had nothing to do with a lab leak because they thought it was wrong. They believed the evidence pointed pretty strongly to a zoonotic spillover, as with SARS and MERS and Ebola and HIV and every other virus dangerous to humans. And like responsible people everywhere, they hated the idea of conspiracy theories spreading that, in their opinion, were both wrong and unhelpful.
Are the experts mistaken? Maybe. It happens. But unless you're a virologist yourself it's really not possible for you to understand the evidence. That's frustrating, but it is what it is. The people who do understand the evidence almost universally believe COVID was produced naturally, just like every other pandemic virus in human history.
And since there have been hundreds of pandemics over the ages, it was inevitable that eventually the lottery would produce one in a city with a large biological research lab. I won't deny that this is a helluva coincidence. I won't deny that Chinese intransigence is suspicious. I won't deny that we haven't yet identified an animal pathway for COVID.
But the virology community pretty unanimously believes the genetic structure of the COVID virus shows no signs of an artificial origin, either engineered or accidental. Any honest discussion of COVID needs to acknowledge this in some depth—without immediately dismissing it by resorting to some juvenile snark about "peer reviewed" being worthless garbage these days.
If you want a personal opinion, I'd say the evidence is 95-5 in favor of a zoonotic origin of COVID. There's a small chance it was produced during routine research in a lab and then accidentally released, and there's nothing wrong with continuing to look into that. But right now there's lots and lots of evidence for a natural origin and virtually none for a lab origin.
A conversation the other day prompted me to reevaluate the way we talk about teens and social media. It's usually framed as whether social media is good or bad, and that's obviously not very useful.
The internet has a tendency to bifurcate things. Most famously, I believe that the internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. Smart people, who have the background and context to manipulate search engines and other tools can become far more productive and less error-prone than in the past. Dumb people, by contrast, are more likely to be taken in by scams and conspiracy theories. They end up dumber than if they'd never logged on.
The same is true for teens and social media: it makes the popular ones more popular and the lonely ones more lonely. It's pretty easy to see how this happens. Popular teens have always had multiple outlets to improve their popularity—school, parties, cliques, etc.—but social media gives them even more. Conversely, unpopular kids now have yet another group to be shut out of.
There's really nothing we can do to get rid of social media. We are social animals and it's here to stay. And for kids who are either popular or even average, there's probably nothing we need to do.
The problem is with the small group of kids who are (a) already unpopular and lonely and (b) especially sensitive to being left out of social media. These are the ones likely to be driven into even deeper problems, and that's where our focus should be.
But what's the best way to address that? Any ideas?
POSTSCRIPT: I have another, more speculative theory as well. Perhaps the problem is that introverts need downtime away from other people, and social media makes that harder to get. Even the introverts are being constantly texted and iChatted and Instagrammed and so forth. They are bombarded with human contact, and that's what's making them anxious and depressed. They just need to be convinced to ditch their phones at night and unwind with a few hours of me time, the way introverted teens used to.
Recently I discussed the connection between high neuroticism and left-wing politics. In passing I mentioned that the right-wing had its own problems, leading a few of you to ask what those were.
The classic response would be to accuse (credit?) conservatives as being low in empathy. Whether or not you agree historically, that answer does not seem to me to be “of the moment.” Instead, I see the more recent right-wing thinkers as falling into a different camp. The pathology I observe most frequently and most intensely is a kind of reckless anger, directed at some semi-imaginary, hypostatized notion of “elites.” In an almost Pavlovian fashion, you can pump up this group by putting out some “bait” about “the elites” and seeing the resentment fly. To be clear, as with the left-wing, this pathology does not have to mean the right-wing thinkers are wrong on the issues themselves.
This is true, but it's not the equivalent of neuroticism. If we're talking about Big Five personality traits like neuroticism among liberals, the equivalent Achilles' heel for conservatives is their generally low score on openness to experience.
This can be understood more easily as fear of new experiences, and conservative media is absolutely built on this. In fact, this is a common misconception about outlets like Fox News. They aren't especially dedicated to radical politics. They're dedicated to promoting specific issues that engage the amygdala and spur outrage born of fear.
It's no longer enough, for example, to think that high national debt is bad for economic reasons. Conservatives have been trained to be in desperate fear that the national debt will wreck the country. Likewise, they are afraid of immigrants. They are afraid of gay and trans folks. They are afraid their kids are being brainwashed in school. They are afraid liberals want to outlaw Christianity. Etc. They aren't just opposed to liberals, they're driven by intense fear of liberals.
This is what I wish we could change. We all have our pathologies, and there's no cosmic right answer about how much we should fear something. But it's gone off the rails in the conservative movement these days. I swear, if we could kill off Fox News and dial down conservative fear a couple of notches, there's hardly any ceiling to what our country could accomplish these days.
Over at Vox, Alissa Wilkinson peddles an increasingly stale meme:
It’s important for the purposes of this article that you know my age: I am on the verge of turning 40. Having been raised in that brief interregnum between the Cold War and the war on terror, I, like many of my peers, assumed that I would live my life in a stable economy and relatively peaceful geopolitical context. I’d go to college, get a job, and then enjoy a gradually increasing salary, benchmarked to a gradually increasing cost of living. Everything would be pretty normal.
Ha! Ha ha ha!
My adult life has been marked by national and global catastrophic events, recessions, and the growing realization that the stability my parents and grandparents had at my age is vanishingly rare. It’s become distressingly clear that the gig jobs my peers and I relied on to make rent in our mid-20s — but assumed we’d ditch, eventually — have evolved into the only jobs, not stopgaps but survival necessities.
This is true for some people. It's always true for some people. But as a general description of 30-somethings, it's just flat wrong.
Here's the unemployment rate for 35-44 year-olds:
Like everyone, this age group really did suffer through the Great Recession. However, right now their unemployment rate is 2.6%, as low as it's ever been.
But the unemployment rate can be deceiving since it doesn't distinguish part-time and gig workers from full-time workers. So here's full-time employment for 35-44 year-olds:
Once again, it's as good as it's ever been for this age group. But are these just McJobs? Let's take a look at what they pay. Note that this is solely for full-time workers:
Full-time workers are being paid more today than full-time workers of 20 years ago. Now here are median annual earnings for everyone in the 35-44 age group (full-time, part-time, and unemployed):
This is for individuals, not families or households. As with the full-time chart, annual earnings are higher now for 35-44 year-olds than they were 20 years ago.
None of this is to say that this age cohort has no legitimate gripes. It took them several years to rebound from the Great Recession. Some of them—about a quarter—still have outstanding student loan debt that averages around $20,000 and costs them $3,000 per year.¹ And jobs in the arts, as always, are poorly paid and in short supply.
And of course, some of them are just plain not doing well. But that's not unique to this age cohort. Every generation has its share of rich and poor.
The overall picture is pretty plain: on average, 35-44 year-olds are doing as well or better than their parents at that age. It took too long, and I'd prefer it if they were doing better still, but the stereotype of the gig-job millennial is long out of date. Right now, they're doing just fine.
¹These are median figures. Means are higher because they're skewed by enormous student loans taken out by business, law, and medical students, as well as undergrads who attended expensive elite universities.
Inflation is usually blamed on higher prices for commodities, which in turn raise the prices for finished consumer goods. Add in higher labor costs and you get the dreaded spiraling inflation.
But Reuters reports that European central bankers are finally waking up to something else:
Huddled in a retreat in a remote Arctic village, European Central Bank policymakers faced up last week to some cold hard facts: companies are profiting from high inflation while workers and consumers foot the bill.
....Data articulated in more than two dozen slides presented to the 26 policymakers showed that company profit margins have been increasing rather than shrinking, as might be expected when input costs rise so sharply, the sources told Reuters.
...."It's clear that profit expansion has played a larger role in the European inflation story in the last six months or so," said Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management. "The ECB has failed to justify what it's doing in the context of a more profit-focused inflation story."
And it's not just Europe. This is also happening right here in the US:
Since the start of the pandemic in the first quarter of 2020, corporate profits have gone up 42%. During the same period, hourly wages have gone down 1%.
Who gets all this extra money? Mainly corporate executives whose bonuses are tied to share prices, and large shareholders who benefit from higher stock prices, higher dividends, and stock buybacks.¹
On earnings calls, where the only thing that's judged is how much money you make, not how you make it, CEOs are pretty open about the fact that they used the pandemic and our recent bout of inflation as an excuse to raise prices (and profits) as much as they could get away with. The cost of their inputs was part of the reason for higher prices, but the rest was the result of them testing the waters to see how much the market would bear as long as customers thought it was COVID related. All this scheming was taking place at the same time that they were furloughing workers and cutting off their health care during the worst pandemic of the past century.
I don't know what the Fed or the ECB can do about this. Probably nothing. It's a done deal at this point. But if there were any justice, this is the kind of thing that would produce mobs in the street with torches and pitchforks.
¹That is, rich people.
Our president today:
I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections – such as lowering penalties for carjackings.
If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did – I’ll sign it.
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 2, 2023
I understand that this is just some cheap tough-on-crime posturing, and I'll even acknowledge that it's probably politically smart. That said, if you believe in home rule only when you agree with the homies, then you don't really believe in home rule.
Plus there's nothing wrong with lowering penalties for carjacking.¹ As a country we routinely hand out insanely long prison sentences that do nothing to deter criminals but cost all of us tremendously—taxpayers in money and prisoners in wasted lives. At a guess, the only thing wrong with the DC bill is that it doesn't shorten the sentences for more crimes.
¹Carjacking is just one of several crimes that the bill deals with. However, it's a sudden fan favorite because motor vehicle theft is up 100% in 2023. That is, it's up over the past eight weeks. That's not a good reason to panic.
This is the Capitol Building in our nation's capital. As you are reading this, America's legislators are carrying out their solemn duty to promote the general welfare with no thought for themselves. Let us all thank them for their selfless service to our nation.
I'm just fiddling around here, but thought this was interesting:
When you hear about e-commerce, it's commonly described as about 15% of all sales. Which is fair enough. But that includes things like gasoline and eating out, which can't be purchased online, plus autos, which are still mostly an in-person business. If you look at e-commerce just as a percentage of retail sales excluding those three categories, it's currently about 28% of all purchases.
In other words, for ordinary retail goods it's a lot bigger than most of us think. And it's still growing, unlike e-commerce as a percentage of all sales.
Here's the latest from California, bellwether to the nation:
Swept up in unproven voter fraud claims, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors has upended the county’s election process, canceling its contract with Dominion Voting Systems and opting this week to pursue, among other options, the possibility of counting votes by hand.
Supervisor Kevin Crye, part of a newly empowered hard-right majority on the board, also announced at Tuesday’s board meeting that he had been in touch with MyPillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell, a prominent pro-Donald Trump election conspiracy theorist, about supporting a pilot voting system in the rural Northern California county.
California is basically a thin blue swath about 50 miles wide stretching from San Francisco to San Diego. The rest of it—90% of the area but only 25% of the population—is red. Much of it, like Shasta County, is very deep red.
In any case, I wonder if Supervisor Crye understands that he's just done Dominion a big favor? It's yet another data point suggesting that they've lost business in hard-right areas that watch a lot of Fox News. He should be getting a call from Dominion's lawyers tomorrow offering their grateful thanks.