Month: July 2023

Something peculiar occurred to me recently about the pandemic year of 2020. Obviously a lot of things changed: businesses shut down, office towers emptied out, product shortages were endemic, and so forth. But there were also a number of sharp changes that had no obvious connection to the pandemic. For example:

• Pedestrian deaths were up 5% even though driving was down 10%.
• The murder rate soared 27% even though overall violent crime was down.
  .
  
• New business formation skyrocketed even as existing businesses struggled or were shut down.
• Transit fatalities were up by a quarter even though transit use was down by half.
• Auto theft was up even though we were driving less.

You can come up with individual explanations for some of these. Maybe auto thefts were up because new cars were in short supply. Overall, though, there are a whole bunch of these oddities that don't have any straightforward connection to COVID and lockdowns and working from home. Is there a common thread?

For 20 years the safety of US mass transit systems remained about the same. In the pandemic year of 2020 the injury rate went up by half and the death rate more than doubled.

The change in 2020 is explicable as related in some way to COVID. But why have death and injury rates stayed so high since? The number of transit journeys has fallen in half during this time, but the absolute number of deaths has increased by a quarter.¹ This makes no sense. What's going on?

¹The absolute number of injuries has gone down, but not as much as the number of journeys. Thus the rate has increased.

Here's a different look at the homeless in Los Angeles:

Over the course of more than a decade, LA has managed to add 6,000 shelter beds for the homeless. That's about 10% of the 55,000 needed. Last year they added 1,100, about 2% of what's needed.

Shortly after the 2020 election Donald Trump called the secretary of state of Georgia and begged him to "find" the extra votes to give Trump a victory there. We know this because Brad Raffensperger recorded the conversation.

Now it turns out Trump did the same thing with the governor of Arizona. Doug Ducey didn't record his conversation with Trump, but he described it to friends:

President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’s presidential election results, saying that if enough fraudulent votes could be found it would overcome Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona.

....Four people familiar with the call said Trump spoke specifically about his shortfall of more than 10,000 votes in Arizona and then espoused a range of false claims that would show he overwhelmingly won the election in the state and encouraged Ducey to study them. At the time, Trump’s attorneys and allies spread false claims to explain his loss, including that voters who had died and noncitizens had cast ballots.

....After learning that Ducey was not being supportive of his claims, Trump grew angry and publicly attacked him.

This is nothing new. It's just confirmation of what we all knew already. But confirmation is good.

This is the roughest back-of-the-envelope calculation:

• There are perhaps 100 highly selective universities in the US where affirmative action makes a significant difference in enrollment.
• About 4% of Black high school students attend these universities.
• Without affirmative action, that number will be cut in half.

So the impact of the Supreme Court's ban on affirmative action is that roughly 2% of Black students will attend selective universities (UCLA, NYU, Tulane) rather than highly selective universities (Harvard, Northwestern, USC, Princeton). In numbers, that comes to 35,000 or so.

So what's the real impact of 2% of Black kids attending UCLA instead of USC? Tulane instead of Harvard? It's probably not huge. Life will stay exactly the same for the 96% of Black kids who don't benefit from affirmative action in the first place and for the 2% who attend highly selective universities regardless. The remaining 2% will now attend excellent but not quite elite universities.

In theory, the end of affirmative action is a blow to fairness and racial equity. In practice, it probably doesn't make quite as much difference as we might think:

Decades of affirmative action have increased the racial diversity on some of the most selective college campuses that often serve as the primary pipeline into high-status careers. But there isn’t much conclusive evidence affirmative-action policies have leveled the playing field in the U.S. Even as America overall has become more racially diverse, wealth gaps between whites and many minorities have proved persistent and top jobs remain elusive.

....Studies have shown that minorities, after graduating, have attained foot-in-the-door positions but leadership roles largely remain out of reach in the legal world, hospitals and corporate boardrooms.

There is so much more that has to be done. Affirmative action helped, but it was never more than a pinprick.