Month: March 2023

As productivity goes, so goes the nation. Or something like that. In the fourth quarter of 2022 labor productivity increased at an annual rate of 1.7%. That's a little higher than the average of the past decade. Here is productivity since the end of the Great Recession:

Productivity shot up during the first quarter of the pandemic as output declined but people were furloughed or laid off at an even greater rate. A year later we lost some of those productivity gains as companies went on a hiring binge in 2021, but we're now starting to gain it back as hiring has eased but output continues to climb.

This is the two-faced coin of productivity. Higher is better, because it means we're producing more stuff per worker. But is that because we're shedding workers (bad) and still producing more stuff? Or that we're adding workers (good) but producing lots more stuff? In Q4, it was the latter. Hours of work increased 1.4% but output was up even more at 3.1%. So it's good news all around.

Matt Yglesias writes today that certain progressive tropes produce feelings of helplessness and depression, rather than the sense of power and optimism needed for political movements to succeed. One of these is the routine assertion of "harm" or "feeling unsafe" when someone does something you find offensive or even just disagreeable:

Objecting to bigoted or inappropriate language shouldn’t require invoking the concept of subjective harm. Women are entitled to not be subject to petty harassment whether or not the harassment “harms” them; you can both be resilient enough to get on in life and also make claims about how you deserve to be treated.

....It’s wrong to suggest that someone needs to adopt the undignified posture of having been injured in order to stand up for herself. And it’s wrong to teach people that the right way to respond to someone else’s real or imagined misbehavior is to dwell on it and maximize their own pain. Yet even though I think it’s pretty broadly acknowledged that this is a bad way to live one’s life, our educational institutions have increasingly created an environment where students are objectively incentivized to cultivate their own fragility as a power move.

I don't disagree with this, but I want to add something very concrete to it. There are certain words that are deliberately designed to force action from HR, and the entire spectrum of harm words are among them. In particular, if you say you feel unsafe, that's basically a code word demanding that HR take action or risk legal trouble.

Not everyone understands this, but the people wielding this language do. That's why it should be used only when someone genuinely feels unsafe: they're being sexually harassed, for example, or their family has been threatened. But in cases of simple personal offense or disagreement, it's a malicious escalation deliberately meant to get someone in serious trouble—or even fired. Anyone who does this without serious cause should be treated as the asshole they are.

One of the most common suggestions from police reform advocates is to stop using armed police officers for a wide range of tasks that might be better handled by trained dispute moderators and social workers. In Los Angeles, the police union said today it was willing to negotiate this:

As part of its upcoming contract talks, the Los Angeles Police Protective League intends to tell city negotiators that it is willing to let other city departments or nonprofit agencies respond to calls about panhandling, illegal sidewalk vending, urinating in public, mental health episodes in which there is no threat of violence or criminal activity, and dangerous dog complaints in which “no attack is in progress.”

....Council members have been looking in recent months at putting $1 million into an Office of Unarmed Response and Safety. Bass, for her part, promised during her campaign that she would create a public safety office that would not involve the LAPD.

The union is willing to stop having LAPD officers head out to homeless encampment cleanups, unless a deployment request is made by a city agency. Officers would stop making most “welfare checks” requested by the public. And they would no longer tackle certain quality-of-life calls, such as illegal dumping, illegal fireworks, noisy parties and drinking in public.

The union's statement was apparently received positively, but I remain cynical. These things are all basically scutwork that police officers have never wanted to do in the first place, and I am completely unsurprised they are "willing" to give them up. The question is, are they also willing to give up a big chunk of their budget in order to fund all the new unarmed responders? $1 million sure isn't going to do the job, after all.

My guess is that they want to shed this stuff but keep all the money they have now, which will make the whole proposal a nonstarter. I will apologize profusely if I turn out to be wrong.

Hot off the press from the BLS, here is the 2022 unemployment rate for each region of the US:

Want to know how your state did? Just click here.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I set up my telescope in the backyard to do a little testing. I was extremely restricted in my view, and I ended up semi-randomly taking a picture of M81, aka Bode's Galaxy. It was surprisingly good.

A few days later I took another picture, and although it wasn't really a lot better, it showed some color that didn't come through in the first picture.

Finally, when I was out in the desert last week shooting the Pleiades, I finished up by midnight because that's when the Pleiades fall below the horizon. So I figured I'd give M81 another try under a nice, dark sky. Unfortunately, something weird happened that ruined most of my images¹ and I ended up with only four good subs.² But that turned out to be enough to get a pretty nice picture.

Here they are. The bottom image is the original one from my backyard. The middle one is also from my backyard. The top one, which shows considerably more detail and some subtle colors, was taken out in the desert.

¹I still don't know what it was. After the meridian flip, every image was a little blurred and had a big triangle of empty black space at the top center. The blurriness might have been a focus problem, but the Bermuda Triangle thing is just inexplicable.

²This is astro-ese for subexposure. The more the better!

Ron DeSantis has written a book! Let's see what's in it:

DeSantis, who this week begins a media tour to promote his new book “The Courage to Be Free,” launched a “Prescribe Freedom” campaign in January that proposes permanently limiting Covid-19 vaccination and mask requirements and giving cover to physicians whose medical views depart from scientific consensus. He also plans to set up a panel to review recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and called for a grand jury to “investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians” related to the Covid vaccine.

DeSantis’ attention to the issue is having real-world impact — and not just in Florida. GOP lawmakers across the country, in some cases emboldened by DeSantis’ ramped-up rhetoric, have introduced hundreds of bills this year under the medical freedom banner, including proposals to put lawmakers in charge of immunization requirements, ban the government from creating non-school-based vaccine mandates and allow citizens to challenge public health disaster declarations.

DeSantis's efforts to out-Trump Trump are so plainly performative that it's hard to believe anyone takes them seriously. But they do.

According to a recent report from the CDC, here is the change in vaccination coverage of 2-year-olds over the past couple of years:

This is the most recent data available. Every single vaccination series is up. The complete 7-vaccine childhood series is up. The number of toddlers with no vaccination coverage is down. Here is the CDC:

U.S. coverage with most recommended childhood vaccines has remained high and stable for many years. Increases in coverage by age 24 months were observed for most vaccines.

....This report did not identify any overall decline in vaccination coverage associated with the COVID-19 pandemic among all children. The youngest children were born in 2019. These children reached age 12 months in 2020 and 24 months in 2021; therefore, many of these children had vaccine doses recommended after the pandemic was declared in March 2020.

....Vaccination coverage declined for children living below the federal poverty level or in rural areas during the pandemic, and substantial variation in coverage by sociodemographic characteristics persists. As observed elsewhere, estimated coverage was highest among Asian children and lowest among Black children.

Here's a look at vaccination coverage over a longer period:

This report doesn't break down vaccination coverage by state, and obviously some states are better than others while others are worse. Overall, though, this is yet more good news, and, I suspect, not something that most people know.

NOTE: In my chart I used the years in which the children turned 2. The CDC chart uses birth years.

For what it's worth, here is the most recent set of expected inflation numbers from the Cleveland Fed:

The 5-year/5-year forward inflation measure is currently at 2.2%, which closely matches the Cleveland Fed 5-year estimate. Note that all of these figures are continuing to go down even after January's re-benchmarking and the bad January inflation numbers from both the CPI and PCE.