Month: June 2023

I caught up with Bob Somerby today and it turns out he's been lamenting a spate of recent articles about the "Mississippi Miracle." I don't blame him. Reports of educational breakthroughs are often overblown and should be taken with several grains of salt. Still, let's take a look at this one.

Mississippi passed a package of education reforms a decade ago, including a commitment to the "science of reading"—which mostly means focusing on phonics. So how have they done? We can look at their NAEP scores, but raw scores won't do us much good. There are at least two things we have to do first:

• Compare to national scores. If Mississippi's scores are just matching gains in the rest of the country it's not much of a miracle.
• Disaggregate Black and white scores. Black kids score consistently lower than white kids, and that will skew the results if the ratio of Black and white kids in schools has changed. You have to look at them separately.

With that said, here are scores in reading for 4th graders:

That looks fairly miraculous. White kids have gained 14 points on everyone else since 2013 and Black kids have gained 13 points. That's a lot! But do they hold onto those gains in 8th grade?

Still not too bad. White kids have gained 7 points and Black kids have gained 6 points. That's a little less than miraculous, but still fairly good performance. Now let's see how those 8th graders did in math:

Hmmm. That's exactly the same as the gains in reading. Why would a focus on phonics produce gains in math? Something isn't quite right here.

Bob is skeptical of these scores for another reason: Mississippi's reforms included something called the "third-grade gate," which means holding back kids who can't pass a reading test at the end of the year. This is obviously going to improve scores for 4th graders, but it's a bit of a statistical mirage.

On the other hand, only 9% of Mississippi's third-graders are held back, so the effect is probably modest. I'm more worried about this from a recent Nick Kristof column:

The third-grade gate lit a fire under Mississippi....As third grade progresses in Mississippi, there is an all-consuming focus on ensuring that every child can read well enough to make it through the third-grade gate. School walls fill with posters offering encouragement from teachers, parents and students alike. “Blow this test out of the water,” wrote Torranecia, a fifth grader, in a typical comment.

....Those who did not pass would get a second chance at the end of the school year. Children who fail this second try are urged to enroll in summer school as a last desperate effort to raise reading levels.

This is the kind of thing that leads to rampant teaching to the test or, more seriously, outright cheating. There's no evidence this is happening, but it's something to keep an eye on.

Overall, it looks to me like Mississippi is indeed doing well, but perhaps not as well as its boosters have it. Scores wash out somewhat by 8th grade and reading improvements are no better than math improvements, which calls into question how good the new reading program is. Grains of salt, people.

About five minutes after I wrote that Wagner mercenaries were advancing on Moscow at "light speed," they suddenly . . . stopped. Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that he had accepted a personal deal to exile himself to Belarus while his troops would be pardoned and put under the control of the Ministry of Defense. It's all over.

That's assuming this is on the up-and-up, not some kind of weird ruse. And who knows about that? Wait and see.

If it's possible to know less than zero about something, that's my knowledge of the Wagner Group insurrection/coup taking place in Russia right now. It's hard to say if there's anyone to root for here, since on one side we have Vladimir Putin, a thug who started a huge, unprovoked war with Ukraine, complete with rapes, indiscriminate bombings, civilian slaughter, and a myriad of other war crimes. On the other side we have Yevgeny Prigozhin, who's little more than an unpolished version of Putin as head of the brutal Wagner mercenary group

"What they're really known for, frankly, at this point, is atrocities," said [Jessica Davis, president of Insight Threat Intelligence]. "They've committed a number of atrocities in the Central African Republic in 2018 and 2021, and more recently in Mali. "So while they are a private military corporation or a mercenary group, they're really, at this point, known for killing civilians and committing atrocities and war crimes."

Prigozhin used to be close to Putin, and Wagner's army roamed all over the world earning money for the Putin regime. Wagner's troops trained hand-in-hand with Soviet troops and played a leading role in the initial invasion of Ukraine. Prigozhin later called the invasion a mistake and became increasingly bitter over his treatment during the grueling and destructive battle for Bakhmut in the central Donbas, claiming that his men had been shelled by Russian troops.

As for what's happening right now on the ground, information is sparse. But I can at least show you a map of Wagner's alleged progress over the past few days, starting in southern Ukraine and heading toward Moscow:

Here's a Google Map version that's a little more legible:

Can this be true? There have been plenty of reports of the Wagner convoy heading north, but did they really make 400 miles in just a few days from Rostov-on-Don to Lipetsk? Are they invading in Teslas or something? And are the Russians bothering to put up any resistance at all?

In any case, if these maps are accurate it means Wagner could be on the outskirts of Moscow in just a few more days unless an actual Russian army shows up to stop him.

As for Putin, he gave a national TV address today. He called for the arrest of Prigozhin, which is obviously more easily said than done, but didn't offer any specifics about what he was going to do about the advance of the Wagner Group. However, aside from obvious anger over Prigozhin's betrayal, he seemed generally calm about the whole thing:

Putin’s full national address condemning the insurrection, with English-language subtitles. pic.twitter.com/i0sRCe3Dbw

— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) June 24, 2023

There's much more about the coup elsewhere, but it's nearly impossible to assess its accuracy. At the moment, Wagner seems to be advancing unopposed and has made remarkable progress.

As for the war in Ukraine, who knows? Russian troops in eastern Ukraine, where all the combat has taken place over the past year, seem to be doing nothing, just prosecuting their fight and letting the Wagner folks leave without resistance. How this affects Ukraine's chances in the war is anyone's guess, but it can hardly be good news for Russia, can it?

A couple of weeks ago Public ran a story identifying three Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who became sick in November 2019 with a "COVID-like" illness. If this was true, it would mean they were the first people in the world to contract COVID-19, which in turn would suggest they were the victims of a leak from their own lab, where they were working on SARS-like coronaviruses.

The three scientists were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. Today, Jon Cohen reports in Science that he has gotten comments from two of them:

As for Hu, he categorically denies having anything to do with the origin of SARS-CoV-2. “I did not get sick in autumn 2019, and did not have COVID-19-like symptoms at that time,” Hu wrote. “My colleagues and I tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibody in early March 2020 and we were all negative.”

Yu emailed Science that the charges are “fake news” and similarly insisted there was no basis for the allegations. “In autumn 2019, I was neither sick nor had any symptoms related to COVID-19,” Yu wrote.

There's no way of knowing if they're telling the truth, of course, and promoters of the lab-leak theory had been pinning their hopes on an upcoming report from the Director of National Intelligence that promised to disclose everything the American intelligence community knew about the origin of COVID-19. The report missed its deadline, but today it was finally released. No dice:

Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19....We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19. One researcher may have been hospitalized in this timeframe for treatment of a non-respiratory medical condition.

....While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.

None of this proves anything, of course. However, the fact that three scientists in Wuhan became ill in November 2019 has been known for quite a while, and identifying them by name doesn't really change anything. So that was hardly breaking news in the first place.

Natural evolution of COVID-19, subsequently transmitted to humans by an animal host at the Huanan fish market, remains the overwhelmingly most probable explanation of its origin. But it's unlikely we'll ever know for sure.

Over at Vox, Emily Stewart says that over the past couple of years even "the economy’s winners feel like losers."

Historically speaking, higher-income families have consistently felt more confident about the economy than lower-income families, explained Joanne Hsu, who runs consumer surveys for the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. That’s changed. “About a year ago, there started to be a convergence of sentiment by income,” she said. “We’re at very low levels of sentiment, and unlike most periods over the last 75, 80 years, higher-income and lower-income folks have similar levels of sentiment.”

This got me curious, so I clicked over to the consumer sentiment surveys that Joanne Hsu mentions. I noticed an odd thing. As an example, when you ask vaguely about "financial situation," here's what you get:

There's a ton of noise in this series, but sure enough, if you go back five years there's a noticeable difference in optimism between rich and poor: the rich think things will get better over the coming year while poor people aren't so sure.

Now fast forward to the recent past and just about everyone feels the same way. To the extent there's a difference at all, it's the poor who are most optimistic.

But now let's change things up. If you ask concretely about "household income," here's what you get:

Now there's no change. Across the entire timespan the rich are more optimistic than the poor, and that remains true today.

I diddled around non-rigorously among the charts and found roughly similar results everywhere. If you ask something concrete, there's been little change, with the rich consistently more optimistic than the poor. Unfortunately, I don't really know what this means. But I'm not so sure the affluent are really feeling like losers these days.

Here's some weird shit based on responses to the American Time Use Survey:

Sadly, there's no time series for this since no one cared much about it before now. However, based on commuting microdata from its annual American Community Survey, the Census Bureau estimates that working from home hit about 18% in 2021, while their Pulse survey says it dropped further to 14% in 2022:

So: 34% vs. 14%. These are wildly different estimates, and I can't imagine what the reason is. What's more, the estimates for educational level are out of this world: ATUS estimates that 50% of workers with college degrees work from home on any given day. Can that be real?

For what it's worth, ATUS also says there's a big difference between men and women. On average (combining all educational levels), 28% of men work from home compared to 41% of women.

This is Charlie on the balcony upstairs hiding under a quilt that's draped over the banister. He's keeping an eye on everything going on in the living room downstairs, but out of the frame he's also keeping an eye on Hilbert—who is also up there keeping an eye on the living room. Everybody is keeping an eye on us, as I suppose they well should.

The 2022 edition of the American Time Use Survey is out, which means we can check out more recent data on what people are doing these days. Nothing has changed much over the course of a single year, but there's at least one good table about remote work that confirms something I wrote about a few weeks ago:

Among full-time workers, those who work at work put in a little over eight hours per days. Those who work at home put in a little less than six hours. The difference is nearly 2½ hours per day. That's a huge disparity in what managers can expect from remote workers compared to those who come into the office.

You can invent all sorts of excuses for this. Maybe office workers spend lots of time gossiping around the water cooler but count that as work. Maybe home workers put in fewer hours but work more intensely during those hours. Maybe remote workers are just astonishingly honest about accounting for work when they're keeping track of it in an anonymous diary.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. But the most obvious interpretation here is that home workers spend a lot of time running errands and texting with friends, and as a result they simply work less than office workers.

On another subject that I just happened to run into the other day, here are the latest numbers for attendance at religious services:

Attendance at religious services has been slowly declining for the past two decades and then fell off a cliff during the pandemic. However, attendance rebounded a bit in 2022 for both men and women.

Here's an out-of-the-blue comment about this. The share of people who attend religious services is very close to the share of workers who belong to a union. The decline in both has been very similar too. But which group has more political clout: churches or unions?

A whole lot of folks who were close to retirement went ahead and pulled the lever early after the pandemic hit:

By the end of 2022 retirements peaked at about 2.95 million extra retirees compared to standard projections. Then excess retirements declined in April to about 2.4 million above projections. The authors suggest this may explain some of the weirdness in the labor market:

Excess retirements are still well above our predicted trend, which may be contributing to a continued tightness in the labor market and low unemployment rate since the recovery from the pandemic recession.

In other words, the labor market has gotten tighter in relative terms thanks to excess retirements. However, because these people were close to clocking out anyway, it may not be affecting productivity or economic growth much. I'd say it's possible this could explain some of our recent economic weirdness, but I'm a little skeptical since we see similar dynamics when we look solely at prime-age workers where retirement isn't a factor.

Next?

Here's a headline from the print edition of today's LA Times:

Why Silicon Valley's elite adore RFK Jr.
Palo Alto, though long a bastion of privilege, loves the illusion of a scrappy underdog

Scrappy underdogs? Hmmm. When you get to the text of the story it turns out there's something else at play in their infatuation with RFK Jr.:

He’s been championed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, promoted on a live audio event hosted by Elon Musk, and embraced by the venture capitalist podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, who not only endorsed Kennedy for the Democratic nomination, but also threw him a fundraiser.

....Why, just a decade and a half after embracing the Obama-Biden ticket....are the loudest voices in Silicon Valley throwing their weight behind a man who just claimed that Wi-Fi causes cancer?

....The first reason is pretty obvious: COVID and vaccine denialism is in vogue with a prominent subset of Silicon Valley’s power players.

Kennedy has spent the last two decades as one of the leading voices for the anti-vaccine movement, alleging a (spurious) link between vaccines and autism....He was kicked off Instagram for spreading misinformation but embraced by figures such as Tucker Carlson, as the right’s dalliance with anti-vax politics bloomed.

That was also around the time when Musk became a prominent COVID skeptic too; in the early days of the pandemic, Musk tweeted that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.”...Dorsey, the Silicon Valley figurehead who has most fully endorsed Kennedy, too, has been cozying up to anti-vaccine views of late, although he’s long embraced other questionable health fads and self-styled gurus....Less mainstream tech figures, such as LimeWire’s Gorton and InfoSeek founder Adam Kirsch, have fully embraced the anti-vax movement — and RFK Jr. too.

So there you have it: A lot of tech geniuses may be geniuses, but the same high-powered minds which convince themselves that Uber-but-for-pineapples is a great idea are the same high-powered spectrum-y minds that take leave of the real world and convince themselves we should colonize Mars and stop taking vaccines.

In other words, many of them are brilliant crackpots. This is just the latest evidence.