Month: July 2023

WTAF?

Big companies just can't help themselves:

Some of the largest consumer brands in the country have continued to raise prices aggressively this year while raking in large profits, posing a tough problem for the Federal Reserve as it aims to tame inflation.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Unilever have each reported raising prices significantly in the second quarter, from about 8 percent at Unilever to 15 percent at Pepsi.

Meanwhile, wages continue to grow at a slower pace than inflation.

Ron DeSantis decided today he has something on his mind:

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), when asked if he would consider naming 2024 Democratic candidate RFK Jr. as his vice president:

“Sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC.” pic.twitter.com/C7wASCmbt6

— The Recount (@therecount) July 26, 2023

DeSantis undoubtedly blurted this out because he figured it would own the libs. What he doesn't realize is that virtually all of us libs can't stand RFK Jr. DeSantis isn't owning anyone.

This is sort of like the Hunter Biden affair. Conservatives just can't get it through their heads that most libs don't care about Hunter Biden. Unless there's evidence connecting his sleaziness to Joe Biden—and there isn't—we just don't give a rat's ass.

I got the itemization of charges for my CAR-T treatment today. Check it out:

Yes, that's seven digits. There are some other trivial charges, just a few measly tens of thousands of dollars here and there, that bring the entire cost of the procedure to about $1.2 million. Under the circumstances, I guess I can't complain about my high Obamacare premiums anymore, can I?

Now, I'm sure that Kaiser Permanente's negotiated rate is much less than this. Still, it's an impressive thing to get emailed to you.

This is a cloudy peak on the road to Mt. Baldy. I was about ten miles from the top when I took it, and hoping to get a good picture of Baldy itself. But it turns out you can't, really. The only place you can get a good picture of Mt. Baldy is way down in the flats. If you get any closer than that, the view is blocked by other peaks—like this one.

It's really high:

And the Wall Street Journal reports that it might even be worse:

The true level of China’s unemployment rate for young people ages 16 to 24 may be even higher than indicated by official data. Zhang Dandan, a Peking University economist, estimated the real youth unemployment rate in March could have reached 46.5%, compared with the official figure that month of less than 20%, if the millions of people who aren’t participating in the workforce also were counted.

Jonathan Chait has a long piece in New York about the right's latest "master theory" of political war: namely that ever since the '60s the left has engaged in a cultural "long march" that has steadily taken over practically every influential American institution—entertainment, universities, big business, etc.—and the only hope for conservatives is to wage a scorched-earth counter-revolution from within the government. Why government? Because it's the only institution they still have a chance of controlling. They just have to win elections to do it.

Now, some of this has an obvious element of truth, but other parts are faintly ridiculous. Big corporations might spout crowd-pleasing slogans now and then, but they're still a Republican stronghold. Just check out the Chamber of Commerce or the Business Roundtable if you're unsure of this. The military remains steadfastly conservative regardless of their pragmatic stance toward gay and trans recruits. The Supreme Court is dominated by conservatives. Churches that involve themselves in the culture wars are strongly conservative.

So the liberal domination of institutions is a little less complete than the "long march" theorists would have you believe. But the real weakness of their argument is simpler: public opinion is what really matters. Institutions are always downstream of public opinion, changing only after the public demands it. And the plain fact is that conservative social attitudes are overwhelmingly unpopular. Just to run through some of the most obvious examples:

• Opposition to abortion remains limited: solid majorities say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances and that women should be allowed to have abortions "for any reason." Bans on abortion have never been popular and are even less so now. They poll in the mid-teens following the Dobbs decision.
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• Only about a third of the country still wants to ban gay marriage.
• Immigration remains polarized, but there's little support for abolishing policies like DACA. Even a majority of Republicans oppose getting rid of it.
• Less than a third of Americans want to keep marijuana illegal.
• Virtually no one opposes sex education in schools, and less than a third support the conservative insistence that sex ed classes should exclusively teach the benefits of abstaining from sexual activity.
• At the time they were taking place, only a third of Americans opposed the George Floyd protests. To this day, only a minority think the police treat white and Black people equally.
• Transgender issues are still new and fraught, but a core belief in protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing, and general public acceptance generates only tiny opposition.
• Only a third of the country believes that churches should be involved in politics. Less than a quarter think churches should endorse candidates. Only small minorities think the government should favor Christianity. And only about a quarter think the religious freedom of Christians is threatened.
• Only about 15% of Americans think gun laws should be loosened. About a third oppose background checks, high-capacity magazines, and bans on assault weapons. That said, this is one of the very few issues where conservative views, broadly speaking, retain fairly high support.

Taken as a whole, we can say that public opinion remains split on guns and immigration, but in virtually every other area conservative social attitudes are strongly unpopular. Hell, even on the semi-cultural question of raising taxes on the rich, only a quarter of Americans share conservative opposition to the idea.

There are obviously still polarized opinions on the newer and more extreme borders of cultural issues—things like wokeness, puberty blockers for minors, and trans women in sports. There always are until enough time has passed for public opinion to settle down. Generally speaking, though, conservatives have simply lost the country on cultural issues. That's their problem, not the fact that institutions have followed along.

A couple of weeks ago Christine Emba wrote a piece for the New York Times about the grim state of young men in her social circle these days:

They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn or sucked into the alt-right and the web of misogynistic communities known as the “manosphere.”

....Women are surging ahead in school and in the workplace....Men now receive about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 awarded to women....In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners.

This essay is part of a common genre nowadays—there's probably a whole shelf of books on the subject—and it happened to be the third or fourth I had read in a single day. That's just coincidence, but something about it got me curious: just how many of these loser men do we have? And is it increasing?

In the conventional narrative, these men are:

• Young
• Have a high school education or less
• Have a dead end job
• Are single
• Live alone or in their parents' basement

There's no way of knowing how many of these young men there are. That's partly because the definition is necessarily vague, and partly because the numbers don't exist. I didn't even bother trying to quantify it. Instead I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, collecting data related to all this stuff just to see what overall impression it left. We can start with the best known statistic:

There's no question that young men live alone or with their parents more than they used to. At the same time, this number has increased just as much for young women. There's nothing unique to young men here.

Next up is jobs. There are fewer young men working than in the past:

Note, however, that this is true of all age groups and it's nothing new. Labor force participation has been steadily declining for more than 60 years. The 3% drop since 2000 is just the continuation of a trend, not something new about modern manhood. Plus there's this:

This is the unemployment rate specifically for single young men, and it's the same as it's ever been. There's also this:

The decline in work doesn't show up at all in time use surveys. And young, low-income, high school educated men are earning as much as ever:

This is for full-time workers, so maybe it's because fewer young men are working full time? No:

More young men are working full time. Now let's change gears. How about that business of college attendance declining? It turns out it's not true in any practical sense:

Enrollment of men is flat and the number who finish up and get a degree is way up. It's true that women outnumber men at universities these days, but that's not because there are fewer men. It's because there's been a modest increase in the number of women.

How about friends? Are young men hanging out in their basements and not socializing?

During the pandemic, young women lost touch with more friends than young men. For all age groups, a 2021 survey reported that 33% of men said they had two or fewer friends compared to 32% of women. There's no difference. At the same time, 43% of men reported five or more friends compared to only 37% of women.

So: young men are working about as much as ever. They make as much money as ever. They get more college degrees. And they have about as many friends—and keep in touch with them—as women do.

There are, obviously some number of young men who fit the description of loser and listen to Andrew Tate podcasts or read Jordan Peterson books. But overall, the picture of young men in America doesn't suggest much of a crisis. After all, there have always been plenty of awkward young men and awkward young women. It's hard to tease out any sense of increase over the years from the evidence about work, college, and friendship.

Since January, asylum applications at the Southwest border have been handled by an app called CBP One. The idea is to bring some order to asylum requests by requiring applicants to make an appointment via the app and then show up legally at a port of entry. For the past two months, if you cross the border illegally you are presumed ineligible for asylum.

In the first half of 2023 the Border Patrol has made about 30,000 appointments per month on the app and recently announced that this would increase to 40,000. As near as I can tell, there are no public records available for the number of asylum applications in previous years, but we can compare 2023 to the number of new asylum filings in federal court:

So asylum applications are (probably) up, but they're more orderly than before. At least, they were until a federal judge decided it was illegal to deny asylum to illegal border crossers:

U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar ruled against a system the Biden administration imposed more than two months ago to penalize migrants who crossed the border illegally and reward those who scheduled appointments to seek asylum instead.

....Tigar sided with advocacy groups who had urged him to reject the restrictions because they said they endangered migrants and violated federal immigration law, which states that anyone on U.S. soil may request asylum, no matter how they arrived.

....Biden administration officials say the rules, in part, contributed to a nearly 42 percent drop in illegal border crossings in June, the first full month the policy was in effect. The Border Patrol made 99,545 arrests last month, the lowest monthly tally since Biden took office.

This is a seemingly intractable problem unless Congress can agree to do something—which they can't. Legally, Tigar is probably right: the law says anyone on US soil can apply for asylum. At the same time, no one believes that the skyrocketing asylum rate is for real. Migrants are well aware that our backlog of asylum cases is so enormous that it will be years before they see a judge, and even if the decision goes against them we don't have the resources to do much about it. So for all practical purposes, you just have to say the word "asylum" and you can stay in the US more or less forever. Who wouldn't do it?

The only durable solution is to vastly enlarge the immigration court system and its enforcement arm so that asylum seekers get a quick trial and are deported if their asylum request is denied. It's hard to think of a reason Congress refuses to do this. It's not as if either side in the immigration debate would be "giving up" something in return for nothing from the other side. Everyone thinks we should expand the immigration court system. Who's against it?

President Biden has proposed a new rule that would require all new electric water heaters to use heat pump technology by 2029.¹ The obvious reason for this is to reduce electricity consumption and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Energy estimates a reduction of 15 million tons per year, which is only about 0.2% of US greenhouse gas emissions, but I suppose every little bit adds up.

However, the big selling point of the proposal is lower costs. DOE estimates it would save the average household $1,868 across the life of the water heater, but over at National Review Philip Klein is skeptical:

Having recently purchased a new water heater for my home, I am well aware of the drawbacks that make it a less-than-optimal choice for many consumers.

Heat-pump water heaters are not only more expensive to purchase, but they are also significantly more expensive to install. When I looked into getting a new water heater, the heat-pump option was thousands of dollars more expensive. This checks out with national averages published on This Old House, which has heat-pump water heaters as up to $2,800 more expensive than standard electric models.

Klein is missing what everyone seems to miss about these things: the proposal itself will almost certainly reduce the price of heat pump water heaters considerably. Manufacturers will start building them at scale, and instead of only a few installers who know how to put them in, everyone will know. That's in addition to the normal price decline you'd see with any new technology after six additional years on the market.

Heat pumps will generally save you some money even now, but it's a close run thing. By 2029 it won't be. It will be a no-brainer.

¹The proposal also includes new standards for gas water heaters.