Cats, charts, and politics
I didn't realize this until I saw it this morning, but if you exclude California homelessness has been steadily declining in the US since 2007. It's down by a quarter over the past 15 years:
You'd never know it from media and activist reports, but homelessness has been a big policy success in 49 states. As usual, though, California is the great outlier when it comes to anything housing related.¹ Policy recommendations should always take that into account.
¹And New York City, to a lesser extent.
Today I learned, via the Washington Post, that several blue states have made it legally possible to ship abortion pills to women in states where they've been outlawed:
A new procedure...allows U.S. medical professionals in certain Democrat-led states that have passed abortion “shield” laws to prescribe and mail pills directly to patients in antiabortion states....The telemedicine shield laws, enacted over the past year in New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Vermont and Colorado, explicitly protect abortion providers who mail pills to restricted states from inside their borders.
....In less than a month, seven U.S.-based providers...have mailed 3,500 doses of abortion pills to people in antiabortion states, according to Aid Access, putting just this small group alone on track to help facilitate at least 42,000 abortions in restricted states over the next year.
....Some lawyers say these doctors could face repercussions, even if they steer clear of traveling to states in which abortion bans call for prosecuting abortion providers....[Julie] Kay said that traditional extradition laws would be difficult to apply in these circumstances. “One state can extradite if a person commits the crime in the state, then flees,” Kay said. “But no one is fleeing here. You are just sitting in your office in New York.”
It turns out that having a makeshift network of doctors do this is just a temporary stopgap. The pills are actually supplied by a pharmacy in California, which will be able to ship directly to customers as soon as California enacts its own shield law—which should be soon. SB345 easily passed the state Senate several weeks ago and is close to passing in the Assembly. It should be signed into law by the end of August.
I'm feeling a little bored so I'm going to do something foolish: make a prediction. In particular, I'm going to make a prediction about the economy.
As most of you know, my view of the economy has always been resolutely boring and conventional:
In the current case, the Fed started raising rates in March 2022. Long-term rates hit a new peak around January 2023. If history is any guide, it takes about a year for the economy to respond to higher long-term rates, which means that things will start to slow down around December 2023. Here's a historical chart showing the way unemployment usually starts to rise about 12 months after long-term rates have climbed to a new peak:
There's nothing precise about this. Unemployment generally starts to go up about a year after long-term rates have hit a new peak, but not always. It might happen sooner. Sometimes there's no response at all.
Nevertheless, the increase in long-term rates has been fairly sharp and fairly large this time around, and I'd be pretty surprised if the economy didn't respond in a fairly conventional way. This may seem like a leap of faith based on invisible forces, but those forces are out there burrowing away whether you can see them or not. They're already baked into the cake, and the only real question left is the exact timing and size of the response, not whether there will be a response. Of course there will be.
This is a doctor making his way from Medical Office Building 1 to Medical Office Building 2 at my local Kaiser Permanente hospital. I've spent many an hour whiling away the time in MOB 2.
Dan Wang writes this week about Xi Jinping's increasing obsession with controlling every aspect of Chinese society and the impact this has on the already parlous state of China's technology sector:
The general political environment poses perhaps the greatest threat to technological momentum....I grow less certain that a third-Xi term China will sustain an innovative drive.
A lot of entrepreneurial Chinese are unsure too. The most startling news story I read this year is that rising numbers of Chinese nationals are being apprehended at the Mexican border, trying to make the crossing into the United States. I had not imagined that some Chinese would find such a harrowing trip to be worthwhile. That comes on top of the well-reported trend that many Chinese entrepreneurs have decamped to other markets. In the last few months, I’ve chatted with a good number of Chinese undergrads in the US, who almost to a person tell me that their parents are urging them not to return to the mainland. These groups make up a miniscule percentage of China’s population. But tech development depends on them too.
This dim view of China's technological progress shows up in patent activity as well. We've all seen the charts showing Chinese patent applications skyrocketing, but those are badly misleading for two reasons. First, China employs a subsidy system that encourages inventors to file meaningless patent applications, which results in impressive but ultimately hollow numbers. What matters is patents granted. Second, unlike the US, China grants a very large number of design and "utility" (i.e., small incremental) patents. But the patents that matter are "invention" patents. Here's what that looks like:
The US grants four times as many serious patents as China. What's more, US patents are of far higher quality:
Another measure of patent quality also leaves China far behind the US:
Only 4.17 percent of 1.2 million Chinese patent applications were filed overseas, and 6.31 percent of the total patents were granted in foreign countries. Conversely, 43.40 percent of 521,802 U.S. patent applications were filed overseas, and 48.10 percent of the total patents were granted in foreign countries.
There are several reasons why Chinese companies file so few foreign patents, but one is that China's lower-quality patents are unlikely to withstand international evaluation.
If you put all this together, China doesn't look like a technological powerhouse. They have plenty of world class research, but it's focused in very specific areas that are often mandated by the central government, leaving important areas such as biotech, AI, and semiconductors as backwaters. As with so many things China, a dynamic facade disguises the fact that it's basically still a developing country and the US remains about six times wealthier and more productive.
In the Washington Post, David Byler shows us how often people decide to change their self-identified race:
About 14% of Hispanics switch to white, as do 26% of multiracial folks.
The multiracial category is fairly small, so the switchers don't affect the overall racial picture much. But that's not the case for Hispanics, who make up 19% of the total US population. If 14% of them switch to white, that's about 2.5% of the entire population choosing to switch from Hispanic to white.
Byler points out that this is good news for conservatives, since those who switch to white are more likely to vote Republican. In fact, they're more likely to vote for conservative Republicans. And these days, 2.5% is more than enough to tip an election one way or another. This is hardly the biggest electoral issue of our time, but it's worth keeping in mind.
Here is Donald Trump's support in the Republican primary since the beginning of 2022:
Trump's level of support is bafflingly steady. He routinely blurts out absurdities and nothing happens. He gets indicted twice and nothing happens. Ron DeSantis enters the race and nothing happens. His mental acuity shows obvious signs of decline and nothing happens.
If none of this stuff affects him even slightly, his support must depend on something else. But what? His policy positions are unremarkable. His anti-wokeness is moderate by modern Republican standards. His applause lines are old and kind of stale.
So what precisely is it that motivates so many Republicans to support him through thick and thin? These aren't just MAGA Republicans, after all. There are too many of them. They span the gamut from MAGA to moderate. And their support never wavers.
So what is it? Why do so many ordinary Republicans stick to Trump like glue? What's the attraction? I know it seems kind of late in the day to be asking this, but there really is an enigma here that's never quite been fully answered. Maybe we'll never know.
CBP released border encounter numbers for June today, and they're down a lot from last month:
The June decline is fairly typical for the start of summer, so there's no telling yet if it's temporary or not. Of the 145,000 border encounters in June, about 45,000 were asylum requests and 100,000 were attempts to cross the border illegally.
With Title 42 gone, asylum requests are now mostly handled via the CBP-One mobile app. CBP has announced that they will accept about 40,000 appointments per month via the app.
Earlier today I posted a chart showing that in-person classes were canceled at higher rates for poor kids compared to richer kids during the early days of the COVID pandemic. The same was true for Black vs. white students and for students with high-school educated parents.
My assumption, naturally, was that this all happened for the usual reason: we just don't care that much about poor Black kids, so they get the short end of the stick. But it turns out that probably isn't true. The real reason for the difference is that poor parents—and Black parents and non-college parents—actively preferred remote learning. They didn't want their kids returning to classrooms during the pandemic.
To a large extent, classrooms were re-opened in richer, whiter schools because that's what parents pressured administrators to do. Likewise, they were kept closed in poorer, blacker schools because that's what those parents pressured administrators to do.
I don't know the reason for this, though I've read anecdotally that many Black parents were relieved to get their kids out of schools where they were anxious and troubled. They reported that their children were calmer and happier once they were away from their toxic school environment.
There's more detail about this here. The upshot is that different rates of school closure don't seem to be the fault of unions or Democratic governors or woke activists. Those might play a modest role, but it mostly seems to be the simple result of parent preference. When parents wanted the schools open, they stayed open. When they wanted them closed, they were closed.
Bottles of Benriach at La Maison de Whisky in Paris. The shop is in the Madeleine district and we passed it whenever we walked out toward the Place de la Concorde.
