Month: July 2023

Here's an interesting little tidbit about religion in America. Devin Pope of the University of Chicago has been tracking church attendance using cell phone data that tells us whether you're really in church, and his results are remarkably consistent:

Week in and week out, there are roughly 25 million Americans at church each Sunday. Note that this is not the number who attend church every single week. It may be different people each week who make up the 25 million. So how does this compare to the number who say they attend church?

People lie a lot about church attendance! A quarter of Americans say they attend church weekly, but in reality fewer than 3% of them do. That's about 8 million regular weekly churchgoers.

That's . . . not very many. And not counting the Christmas & Easter crowd, only about 12% of Americans attend church at all. That's not very many either.

Vehicle miles traveled per adult peaked in 2004 and has fallen pretty steadily since then. By 2022 it had partly recovered from its pandemic dip but was still 10% below the 2004 peak.

Last year Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided he needed to revive the old State Guard under his personal command—in order, he said, "to respond to a projected active hurricane season." In particular:

In a natural disaster-prone state such as Florida with a potentially active hurricane season on the horizon, there is a clear and present need for a larger civilian emergency response force.

But times change, and so do ambitions:

Promoted by DeSantis as an “emergency focused, civilian defense force” when it was established in June 2022, the state guard has quickly morphed into something quite different....Volunteers have been trained for military combat, including the use of weapons; khaki polo shirts and pants were replaced by camouflage uniforms;

Additionally, DeSantis’s compliant, Republican-led state legislature has contributed to the change of direction, this year approving a massive expansion in the force’s funding, size and equipment. Its budget increased from $10m to $107.5m, and its maximum size more than tripled from 400 recruits to 1,500.

On the governor’s shopping list were helicopters, boats, police powers and reportedly even cellphone-hacking technology for a force outside of federal jurisdiction, and accountable directly to him.

....Maj Gen John D Haas, Florida’s adjutant general overseeing the state’s national guard...seemed to confirm the veterans’ assertion that the state guard’s brief had changed. It was a  “military organization”, he said, that will be used for “aiding law enforcement with riots and illegal immigration”.

Several veterans have recently quit the Guard over this change in direction and have gone public with their concerns. The response, generally speaking, has been to accuse them of being whiners who should pound sand. DeSantis has his personal little military force in hand, and he has no intention of letting go.

What really happened with Sweden and COVID-19? The story is a little more complicated than you usually hear, but you don't have to get too deep in the weeds to see that something interesting happened there.

Start off in 2020, when the pandemic begins and Sweden adopts the most hands-off policy of any peer nation. There are no lockdowns, no school closings, no restaurant closings, and no masking. Here's how they did:

Even in those early days, Sweden's death toll was fairly low, and it would have been even lower if not for their catastrophically bad handling of nursing homes. If they had even matched the performance of other countries in their protection of the elderly, their excess mortality rate would have been down around 5%.

Still, the pandemic continued to rage and Sweden's death rate was higher than other Scandinavian countries. So in late 2020 they cracked down a bit. Large groups were prohibited, schools were allowed to close if they wanted, and the government gave itself authority to shut down shops.

Importantly, though, these changes were modest and mostly voluntary. In practice, almost nothing changed. Restaurants, bars, shops and gyms all stayed open, and although schools were allowed to close, few did.

In one sense then, the "Swedish model" changed when the COVID death rate stubbornly stayed too high. But it was a very modest U-turn, and Sweden remained far more open than most other countries. Its model was basically intact, and it eventually produced this:

Over time, Sweden has had one of the best excess mortality rates among advanced countries despite having one of the worst vaccination rates:

One reason for Sweden's success is that although government recommendations were just those—recommendations—Swedes generally took them seriously:

In a survey by Sweden’s Public Health Agency from the spring of 2020, more than 80% of Swedes reported they had adjusted their behaviour, for example by practising social distancing, avoiding crowds and public transport, and working from home. Aggregated mobile data confirmed that Swedes reduced their travel and mobility during the pandemic.

Swedes were not forced to take action against the spread of the virus, but they did so anyway. This voluntary approach might not have worked everywhere, but Sweden has a history of high trust in authorities, and people tend to comply with public health recommendations.

Would this work elsewhere? One may doubt. But it worked in Sweden and the results were manifold. Restaurants stayed open and people continued to eat in them. Businesses mostly stayed open and people continued to work. Schools stayed open and kids continued to learn. All this happened with fairly minimal intrusion into people's lives and no panic or constantly shifting guidance. There's a lesson to be learned here.

Can someone tell me what's going on with this headline in the Washington Post today?

This turns out to be a routine kind of story we've all read a dozen times. It's about a feud between neighbors that spirals out of control and becomes completely insane. What it's not about is the fact that one of the neighbors is gay. There is almost nothing in the text of the piece that even mentions this, and nothing at all to suggest it has anything to do with the source of the bad blood.

So why highlight it?

It's natural for Republicans to dislike the Democratic agenda and vice versa. But check out these Republican quotes from a Wall Street Journal story today:

“It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are.”...If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.”

“We have lost our K-12 schools to radical-left activists. We’ve certainly lost our universities to the same, and other institutions. Everyday Americans,” are being forced “to bend your knee to the rainbow flag.”

“Our base believes that we’re losing our country, and that the left has become radicalized to a point that they no longer believe in America and want to burn it all down and remake it in their image.”

About 80% of Republicans believe that the Democratic agenda, “if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.”

"Downfall." "Bend your knee." "Burn it all down." "Destroy America." The apocalyptic language is what makes things so toxic these days. If you truly believe that Democrats deliberately want to destroy America, what wouldn't you do or believe to defeat them?

I'm hesitant to post this chart, because it comes from a source I'm unfamiliar with and don't know if I can trust. But it seems both interesting and plausible. Zach Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute combined the answers to a whole slew of mental hygiene questions into a single index of teen mental health, and this is what he got:

We've seen similar results before. For some reason, around 2012 teen mental health suddenly plummets (a higher score means worse mental health). And it plummets more for lefty teens than for conservative teens.

Based on the evidence I've seen, I don't believe this is due to social media. Maybe a little bit, but the best research simply doesn't demonstrate that social media plays a big role in teen angst, or that its role is more than strictly limited.

So either this is a statistical artifact, which seems less likely the more we see it, or something else is going on. But what?

Catherine Rampell says that if we achieve the coveted economic soft landing, it won't be because of anything radical we did:

It will be because of boring, standard economic textbook fixes for inflation: i.e., supply shocks subsiding, fiscal support fading and, most controversially, interest rates rising.

The Federal Reserve’s 10 rate hikes since March 2022 seem to have dampened consumer demand and brought it more in line with constrained supply — just as traditional economic theory would predict.

This is true as far as it goes. Consumer spending has indeed been flat since the start of the year. But there's more to spending than just consumers; there's also government spending. If you add the two together, it looks like this:

Total spending has continued to rise over the past year and is right on its pre-pandemic trend. On the other hand, here is gross domestic investment:

Domestic investment has fallen 7% since 2022, though it's only barely gotten recently below its pre-pandemic trend. That said, you'd expect interest rate hikes to affect investment before spending, and that's exactly what's happened.

Take these two together and it looks as if the Fed's policy actions have had only a very modest impact on the economy so far. That impact may well increase in the second half of this year.

I never expected to get dragged down the rabbit hole yet again of Mississippi's "reading miracle," but I have no choice. It looks like I might have been wrong again. Sigh.

Let's recap: In 2013 Mississippi passed a new law that focused on teaching phonics in elementary school. The results were impressive. After the law passed, Mississippi went from well below the national average in reading to well above it in 2022. In all, their kids have gained about 1-1½ grade levels over the past decade.

But Mississippi also did something else: they put in place tough retention policies for third-graders. Those who don't pass a reading test at the end of the year are held back. About 10% of the class is retained each year.

The problem is that this has a mechanical effect on 4th grade reading scores. If you take a 4th grade class and eliminate the bottom 10% (by holding them back), the remaining average will be higher than it should be. When you account for this, it turns out Mississippi made no gains at all. Just the opposite. There's no Mississippi Miracle after all.

We're now up to date with our story. But I've gotten some plausible pushback from researchers who say that Mississippi has always held back lots of kids. In practice, the 2013 law didn't change anything.

This is where things get very subtle, so pay close attention. It turns out 4th-grade classes aren't just missing the 10% of weak students who are held back. What they're getting is 90% normal students plus 10% who were held back the previous year and are now finally being advanced to fourth grade.

But is this new and has to be accounted for, or has it been happening all along and nothing really changed in 2013?

The answer lies in a subtle analysis of age, courtesy of the boffins at the Urban Institute. Students who are held back and then advanced are a year older than the normal fourth graders. Overall, this means the average age of the class will be 0.1 years older than normal. So do we see this jump in age after the 2013 reforms? We do not:

In 2017, the average age of a fourth grade class is a minuscule 0.01 higher than the 1998-2013 average. That's no difference at all. This proxy is strong evidence that Mississippi's retention policies never changed in practice, which means it's entirely kosher to just compare their scores normally before and after reform.

And by that measure we're back to where we started: Something really did happen in Mississippi. After the switch to phonics, their kids could read a lot better than before.

Just sayin':

I know that some of you think I'm crazy for constantly adjusting everything in the world for inflation, but with rare exceptions it's always the right thing to do. Even for the stock market. If it's going up but not even beating inflation, then it's not really doing that great, is it?

Anyway, the S&P 500 is supposed to grow by some percentage every year, which means it should show exponential growth. But if you take its pre-pandemic performance and then fit an exponential trendline to it, it hasn't even recovered to its boring old trend. Some bull market.