Month: August 2023

I was reading an article this morning that, in passing, blamed the slowdown in world trade on a switch in spending among consumers from goods to services. But not really:

It's true that spending on goods has been flat since mid-2021 while spending on services has continued to rise.¹ But trade is all about absolute numbers. Despite the difference in growth rates, spending on goods continues to be above its pre-pandemic trend while spending on services is below it. The big growth in spending on goods during the pandemic may have gone away, but it's come to rest at a very high level.

In a nutshell: Compared to spending just before the pandemic, goods are up 14% and durable goods are up 24%, while services are up only 2%. Whatever the reason for the slowdown in trade, it's not because we aren't buying dishwashers anymore.

¹These figures are for the US only, but I imagine consumer spending in Europe has followed a similar trajectory. Unfortunately, I can't find an EU breakdown by goods and services, so I'm not 100% sure about this.

This is a happy looking dog, no? And it's no wonder since he was getting his walkies at the Balboa Fun Zone. Who wouldn't be happy?

A few days ago the LA Times passed along survey data from UCLA that says kids in California aren't having sex anymore:

In 2021, the survey found, the number of young Californians ages 18 to 30 who reported having no sexual partners in the prior year reached a decade high of 38%. In 2011, 22% of young people reported having no sexual partners during the prior year, and the percentage climbed fairly steadily as the decade progressed.

But why? One expert says it's because kids aren't growing up as fast as they used to. Or maybe it's social media? Or the rise in antidepressant use?

Maybe! Or maybe the UCLA survey is just out of date. Apparently things turned around massively last year:

Shazam! Suddenly young adults are shagging at the same rate as ever. As with so many things, we just had to wait a bit to see some reversion to the mean.

It's suspicious, though, isn't it? Did things really turn around this dramatically in just one year? Sadly, the answer will have to wait two years for the next round of GSS questioning about our private lives.

Atrios on the Wall Street Journal:

Regularly people are shocked to discover that the WSJ editorial page is as loony as Fox News....But they rarely take the next step and consider the likely consequences of that being pumped into the heads of the richest people in the country daily. There's this odd belief that those people must just read it for the news, that they are smart enough to chuckle at the opinion page.

The Journal's editorial page is, in some ways, loonier than Fox News. Fox is mostly about outrage, which means it's ideologically flexible at times. The Journal editorial page isn't. They have firm beliefs and always twist their words to fit them—somehow.

But they aren't stupid, as Fox News sometimes is. For the most part, they don't flatly lie or say transparently dumb things. Their pieces are subtler than that. They know that good propaganda is often more about what you don't say than what you do, which is what makes even smart people vulnerable to their deceptions. Their readers want to believe, of course, which makes them easy marks in the first place, and even diligent readers are seldom knowledgeable enough to realize what's being left out when they read a WSJ editorial or op-ed.¹

So it all gets gobbled up by people who might be smart enough to see through some of Fox's more transparent idiocy but aren't smart enough to know what the Journal editorial page isn't telling them. This has been their MO for more than five decades (ever since Robert Bartley took the helm in 1972) and it's never changed.

And why should it? It works great on their (very influential) audience. They have no idea they're being conned, so they'll lap it up forever.

¹For an excellent example of this, click here.

The Guardian's front page is currently promoting a story that says antibiotic resistance is associated with air pollution—in particular, with small particulates called PM2.5, which are produced mostly by fossil fuels in richer countries and by dust and residential coal burning in poorer ones. Unfortunately, when I clicked through to the study this was based on, I found this:

The misuse and overuse of antibiotics are the main drivers of antibiotic resistance...

This is perfectly reasonable. It's surely the modern, industrial-scale use of broad-spectrum antibiotics that are both the first and main cause of increasing antibiotic resistance. But later on there was this:

We found that the magnitude of the contribution of PM2·5 to aggregate antibiotic resistance is greater than that of antibiotic use...

Now they're saying that air pollution is the primary cause of antibiotic resistance. So which is it?

Data in the study strongly supports the PM2.5 hypothesis. In fact, they report that PM2.5 contributes 10.9% of variation in antibiotic resistance, compared to only 2.4% for antibiotic use.

That's four times as much, which makes this whole result seems unlikely—especially since the study doesn't even hint at an underlying mechanism for the hypothesized PM2.5 dynamic. I'd take this one with a grain of salt for now.

Here is a chart from Semafor that's been making the rounds:

Zounds! A 40-point gap has opened up between Democrats and Republicans over the past two decades. What happened?!?

To see the simple and obvious answer, all you have to do is look at more than three data points:

Republicans generally thought the federal government was OK when George W. Bush was president. Then they suddenly decided it had too much power when Barack Obama was elected. They changed their minds when Donald Trump was elected. Then the federal government suddenly became too powerful again when Joe Biden took office. Democrats display the same trend in reverse.

Moral of the story: stop trying to deceive us with charts based on transparently ridiculous cherry picking. Alternatively, if you genuinely didn't realize this was cherry picking, please find another job.

Here is your super short guide to tomorrow's election in Ohio:

December: Ohio abolishes August elections because they are wasteful and attract low turnouts.

February: Two pro-choice groups submit language for a referendum in November to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.

May: In a turnaround, Republicans vote for one last August election this year. After 111 years of referendums needing 50% of the vote to pass, they suddenly decide it's urgent to ask voters to increase this to 60%.

Tuesday's vote is explicitly about making it harder for the November abortion referendum to pass. It almost certainly has majority support in the state, so Republicans are looking for a way to allow a minority to keep abortion restrictions in place.

If they win, and the abortion measure then loses, don't be surprised if Republicans submit a new referendum to change things back to 50%. That's how they roll these days.

This is the altar at the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur in the Montmartre district of Paris.

The Washington Post says that American companies are trying to reduce their exposure to China. The result is that we're buying less and less stuff from them:

U.S. companies are accelerating efforts to reduce their dependence upon Chinese suppliers, even as officials in Washington and Beijing labor to put a floor under their sour relationship.

Through the first five months of this year, U.S. imports from China were down 24 percent from the same period one year ago, according to the Census Bureau....Foreign investors, meanwhile, are building fewer new Chinese factories, suggesting that other Asian countries will keep increasing their share of U.S. imports at China’s expense.

This stuff is like catnip to me. Usually about five minutes of basic research suggests that these kind of trend stories are mostly nonsense. But this time was different. I checked out import levels and it turns out the Post is right:

In mid-2022, imports from China had grown at roughly the same rate at imports in general. But from August to the start of this year Chinese imports plummeted even as imports from everywhere else stayed steady.

So yes, imports from China are indeed down. This still leaves a bit of a mystery, though: what happened? That is, what happened specifically in the second half of 2022 to account for a sudden and severe decline in imports from China? Donald Trump raised tariffs years ago. Joe Biden announced a ban on selling advanced chips to China last year, but there's no reason that would affect imports. And I don't recall China doing anything in particular to stifle exports to the US. The Post says that various actions on both sides have "chilled commercial ties," but that doesn't really mean anything.

Perhaps this is all a response to pandemic supply chain problems. Companies are starting to reshore their operations outside of China, but that takes a while and it's only showing up now. Maybe. Or it could just be noise in a series that's always been fairly volatile.

Ideas?

Yesterday I wrote about new regulations limiting sulphur content in the bunker fuel used by oceangoing vessels. I concluded that the effect on climate change of these limits was minuscule, but today Alex Tabarrok links to an article in Science that suggests the effect might have been more substantial.

But there are reasons for skepticism. On average, solar radiation amounts to about 1000 watts per square meter. According to a study quoted in the article, this compares to an increase of 0.1 w/m² due to the sulphur limits. That's not a lot.

The 1991 Pinatubo volcano, for example, reduced solar radiation by about 4 w/m², which led to a global temperature drop of 0.5°C. This suggests that a change of 0.1 w/m² would produce a global increase of about 0.012°C, a very small amount.¹

But what about the North Atlantic specifically, where ship traffic is heavy? The study estimates that the effect on solar radiation is about ten times stronger, which might lead to a sea temperature increase of 0.12°C—though this is probably an upper limit thanks to the inertia of ocean temps. This compares to a recorded increase of 0.91°C so far this year. In other words, the sulphur limits are responsible for at most one-eighth of the total warming.

There are other reasons for skepticism. Certain regions of the world are designated as special Emission Control Areas. Sulphur content in these areas was limited to 1.5% in 2005. One such area is the Baltic Sea, but nothing happened there when the new limits took effect:

We're currently seeing a big sea temperature rise in the North Atlantic three years after new sulphur limits took effect, but if you take a look at 2008, which is three years after the ECA limits took effect, sea temperatures start to drop in the Baltic Sea. And in the 17 years since the limits started, Baltic temps have just followed their previous trendline.

Put all this together and there's still little reason to think that the sulphur limits have had much effect on either global warming in general or on North Atlantic sea temperatures specifically. Without all the other factors in play,² it's unlikely we'd even notice anything different.

¹Yes, I'm assuming a linear response. I think that's safe at low levels.

²The eruption last year of an undersea volcano near Tonga; a strong El Niño this year; and an unusual lack of Saharan dust over the ocean.