Month: April 2023

Since today is jobs day, it's worth pointing out that we've reached a milestone. The prime-age labor force participation rate for both men and women has now caught up to its pre-pandemic peak:

This is unusual. In the past two recessions (2000 and 2008), the LFPR declined and never caught back up to its past level. It's yet another indication that the pandemic recession was entirely artificial. Here's another:

In the past two recessions, older workers increased their participation rate both during and after the turndown. This time, participation dropped sharply and has stayed low for the past three years.

The American economy gained 236,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 146,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.5%.

Overall this is a decent but not great report: labor participation is up, the number of unemployed workers is down, and 320,000 new people entered the labor force. On the other hand, there's also this:

The number of new jobs has been steadily decreasing for more than two years now. The economy is still OK, but hardly booming.

Average weekly earnings for blue-collar workers were up 3.9% on an annualized basis. Adjusted for inflation, this is a drop of 1.0%.

You already know about Clarence Thomas and his lavish vacations. But check out this addition to the story from LA Times reporter David Savage, who wrote about all this stuff 20 years ago:

Thomas refused to comment on the article, but it had an impact: Thomas appears to have continued accepting free trips from his wealthy friend. But he stopped disclosing them.

That's our Clarence! When you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, don't pull out your hand and apologize. Instead, do a better job of making sure the plebs can't catch you.

Supreme Court justices sure do live in a weird, lawless netherworld where they can do anything they want. That's sort of ironic since they're folks who make up the law for the rest of us.

Today I read this story in the Guardian:

In 2018, almost 30 cities across New York state received federal money to carry out a specific, urgent task: removing lead service lines that poison drinking water. The city of Troy — which sits across the Hudson River and just north of Albany — was among them, receiving $500,000. But five years later, city leaders have failed to spend a single dollar of that money, and have yet to remove a single lead pipe.

This got me curious about how bad the lead situation was in Troy. I'll have more to say about this in a minute, but first let's review the data. Here is the prevalence of childhood lead poisoning in Troy:

This is for two of Troy's three ZIP codes (the third one has never been tested for some reason). The numbers are straight out of a spreadsheet from the New York Department of Health.

And although it's good to see the numbers going down steadily, they are still astronomical.¹ The average for the entire country in 2020 was less than 1%. Is water the cause of this?

Up through 2020, Troy's drinking water was fine, and its lead contamination had gone neither up nor down. That doesn't make it a likely culprit for either the generally high levels of lead poisoning or the steady decline in lead poisoning.

Then, in 2021, Troy's water suddenly went nuts. Lead contamination rose more than 500% and then went up some more in 2022. What on earth could have caused that?

And did it affect the level of lead poisoning among Troy's children? We don't know because we don't yet have testing figures for 2021 and 2022.

---

And that finally gets me to the point I want to make about all this. Troy should unquestionably examine why the lead level in its water suddenly spiked in 2021. That's weird as hell.

That said, the data doesn't seem to suggest that water is really the problem. It just doesn't fit the lead poisoning data. More likely, I think, is that Troy's lead poisoning comes primarily from exhaust pipe lead suspended in the soil. Little kids play outside, pick up lead on their fingers, and then lick it off.

Water is always the first culprit whenever an area has high lead levels and wants to know why. But it's not the only possibility, or even the most likely one. It will take further testing to figure out what's going on in Troy, but just in general I wish we used a lot more lead remediation funding to fix soil instead of lead pipes.²

¹It's worth noting that although Troy has a lot of toddlers with test levels above 5 μg/dL, they haven't reported a single test level above 10 μg/dL since 2018. There are too many kids with lead levels that are too high, but they aren't apocalyptically high.

²Another reason to focus more on lead in soil is that there's nothing parents can do to protect their children from it. Lead in drinking water, by contrast, can be fixed via filtration. This isn't a good solution if the problem is widespread, but if it's limited to a small percentage of homes it's probably a better use of money than digging up every water service line in a city.

In 1968 Lyndon Johnson nominated Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but the nomination failed because Republicans, along with some Southern Democrats, filibustered it. The Southerners didn't like the fact that Fortas was Jewish. Republicans, however, pointed to Fortas's receipt of $15,000 in private funds to give nine speeches at a local law school.

Today, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted millions of dollars worth of vacations and yacht voyages from a billionaire friend over the past few decades. He has reported none of this. As near as I can tell, not a single serving Republican has said anything about this.

As usual these days, IOKIYAR.

This week Republicans have:

• Loudly defended Donald Trump against charges of lawbreaking that he's obviously guilty of.¹ One of them even boasted that he would prevent extradition of Trump to New York, something that's clearly unconstitutional.
• Expelled a Democrat from the Tennessee legislature for bad behavior, with two more to come.
• Arrested the teenage son of a Ron DeSantis foe for using bad memes in a private conversation.

And there's still a couple of days left in the week.

¹They aren't especially important charges, but there's not much question that Trump is at least guilty of the misdemeanor of falsifying business records.

This is the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, overlooking Paris from 400 feet above the city on the hill of Montmarte. It amuses me that it was built as something of a middle finger from rich Catholics as payback for the imprisonment of the pope following the Franco-Prussian war. As it happens, the pope wasn't really imprisoned and, in any case, the French had nothing to do with it. But I guess that didn't really matter. The Catholic church had been getting the raw end of the stick in France ever since the French Revolution, and Paris's Catholic community was eager to show that they could afford to build a huge new basilica while France itself was more-or-less bankrupt following the war.

The top photo is Sacré Coeur. The bottom photo is a view of Paris from Montmarte.

Lindsey Graham, who once proposed a national 20-week limit on abortions, has now proposed a 15-week limit. However, this would only be a ceiling. The law would still allow states to pass more restrictive abortion laws, and this makes it obviously of no interest to liberals.

But what if it were just a straight nationwide rule of 15 weeks for every state? Post-Dobbs, this would give both liberals and conservatives a choice. Do they prefer a checkerboard of abortion bans in some states and no limits in others? Or a consistent 15-week rule in every state?

I myself would prefer to fight it out on a state-by-state basis, but that's based a bit selfishly on the fact that I live in California and the women in, say, Mississippi are fairly distant.

Hypothetically, then, suppose a nationwide 15-week rule were on the table. Suppose it contained reasonable safeguards for the physical health of the mother but very stringent rules for mental health. Suppose additionally that the Supreme Court would allow it.

How popular would such a bill be? Should liberals support it? Should conservatives support it? Or should we all accept that more-or-less forever we're going to have some states where abortion is unrestricted and others where it's completely banned?

Comments?

This is sort of an odd picture. It's the Washington Monument, of course, but it doesn't really look very tall. Is it because of the trees, which distort our sense of scale? Or about shooting it from slightly above its base? Or about the cropping of the photo? I'm not sure.

Via Alex Tabarrok, here's the racial and ethnic breakdown of inventors in the United States. The figures are from a new demographic study done by Ufuk Akcigit and Nathan Goldschlag:

Every nonwhite group is massively underrepresented except for Asians, who are massively overrepresented. Women are also enormously underrepresented:

In this study, "inventor" is anyone with a patent to their name. It's almost exclusively a white and Asian male domain right now.