Month: August 2023

If you ask ten people to define fascism, you will typically get zero real answers. This is because fascism only ever existed once and that was 80 years ago. What's more, most people have no idea what even the original Italian fascists were about, let alone the hazy variety that's been a favorite insult since the '60s.

Like "neoliberal," which these days just means bad and left of center, fascist is now just a generic term for bad and conservative. It has lost all meaning and nobody should use it anymore. If you can't figure out how to say what you really mean without it, maybe you should rethink what you really mean.

The American economy gained a meager 187,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at an even more meager 97,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.5%.

Overall, this is a weak but not catastrophic jobs report. There are no gotchas in the details, and the employment level increased by about 250,000, very close to what the jobs report says.

In somewhat better news, weekly blue-collar earnings increased 3.0% after adjusting for inflation. This is the third month in a row that they've gone up:

This is bad news for the Fed, which is obsessed with labor costs, but good news for workers.

For reasons best left unexplored, I got curious about long-term suicide rates last night and ended up going down a rabbit hole. What I discovered is that everyone is doing it wrong.

Most of the charts you see are based on reports written decades ago plus CDC figures for the past couple of decades. The problem is that these use different methodologies and aren't comparable. However, in 2009 some researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics went back to the original worksheets for death rates and recalculated everything using the current standard. This is available in a series of reports for 1900-1998, while the CDC's WONDER database (as usual) can be used to fill in the figures for 1999-2021. Here it is:

After two decades of slowly rising, the US suicide rate has stabilized over the past few years. It is now at the same level as the 1950s.

UPDATE: The original version of this post had a mistake in recent suicide rates. They haven't gone down, only stabilized. The chart and the text have been corrected.

POSTSCRIPT: Here is the specific methodology used:

1900-1998: Age-adjusted death rates were calculated using the year 2000 standard using the following source documents: age-specific death rates from unpublished worktables from CDC/National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, Mortality data; data from the Special Reports (1956) publication; and electronic data tapes.

1999-2021: Data were analyzed using National Vital Statistics System multiple cause-of-death mortality files. Suicide deaths were identified using International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision underlying cause-of-death codes U03, X60–X84, and Y87.0. Age-adjusted death rates were calculated using the direct method and the 2000 U.S. standard population.

A lot of people, either accidentally or deliberately, have misstated a few things about Wednesday's indictment of Donald Trump for colluding with others to overturn the 2020 election results and keep himself in power. Here they are:

1. Free speech. Even mob bosses have free speech rights. But if your local mafia don tells one of his stooges to kill someone—and you can prove it—then he can be put on trial for murder even if he's not the one who pulled the trigger. Likewise, the Trump indictment is not about speech. It's about planning and conspiracy.
2. Insurrection. There is nothing in the indictment about Trump being responsible for the mob violence on January 6. Nor is there anything about insurrection. He is not being tried for that.
3. Lying. The prosecution doesn't have to prove that Trump knew he was lying when he conspired to overturn the election results. The standard of proof stops short of requiring mind reading: "Reckless disregard of whether a statement is true, or a conscious effort to avoid learning the truth, can be construed as acting 'knowingly.' "

Everybody got that?

This is a panoramic view of Hollywood Boulevard right outside the Hollywood/Highland metro station. If you visit around 11 pm it's not crowded at all.

This is craziness:

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer, said Thursday its U.S. sales, profit and market share had all fallen sharply in the second quarter as consumers abandoned Bud Light following a promotion it did with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

....The company’s market share has been stable since the last week of April through to the end of June, said [CEO Michael Doukeris], while Bud Light’s share is following a similar trajectory....Overall, AB InBev’s second-quarter U.S. sales to wholesalers dropped 15% and sales to retailers dropped 14%, mainly because of the decline in Bud Light.

The decline in sales of Bud Light did indeed slow down in June, but nonetheless it's still going down. Market share of Bud Light since the Mulvaney boycott started has plummeted by a third, from 10% to 6.8%.

And all of this is over a minor online promotion that probably nobody gave a second thought to. I don't normally feel any empathy for gigantic multinational beer companies, but I feel sorry for Budweiser. There's no way they could have predicted that this would cause the MAGA right to go completely insane.

Here's an interesting chart for inflation in goods:

With a 4-month lag, the New York Fed's supply chain index predicts inflation in goods pretty accurately. The Kansas City Fed says the prediction is even more accurate if you use core inflation:

This is intriguing both for the closeness of fit and because it strongly suggests that inflation in goods during the pandemic was all about supply chain shortages and nothing else.

Yesterday the LA Times ran a Rorschach-test of a story about Akhilesh Jha, a developer who is buying up single-family homes and replacing them with apartment buildings. Everybody hates him, but he doesn't care:

In the face of a crushing housing affordability crisis and shortage of available homes, state lawmakers have approved more than 100 new laws in six years that are designed to incentivize new housing proposals and force local governments to approve them.

In Los Angeles, no one is pushing the envelope more than Jha. Besides the 33-unit Harvard Heights project nestled between the 10 Freeway and Koreatown, he has two proposals in the San Fernando Valley to tear down single-family homes and build dozens of apartments and townhomes on the sites — all efforts that never before would have stood a chance of getting built.

Jha is exploiting a variety of new laws that are meant to cut through red tape and allow the construction of high-density housing regardless of local opposition. If your site is near a mass transit station, dozens of restrictions go away. Provide a bit of low-income housing and other restrictions go away. In one case, Jha took advantage of a loophole that makes it easier to build if the state hasn't approved a city's growth plan. This happened to Los Angeles very briefly last year and Jha slipped in his application during the few days LA was out of compliance.

In one sense, Jha is only doing exactly what lawmakers intended. They wanted to make it harder for local opposition to hamstring new construction, and that's exactly what's happened. But Jha has been so aggressive that he's essentially prevented any local input into his projects. He just points to frequently arcane provisions of the law and tells everyone to pound sand.

So: YIMBY hero or ruthless villain? You make the call.

In 2023 so far, immigration courts have approved nearly half of all asylum cases they've heard:

There's a remarkable spread in asylum leniency by judge and by city. In Houston, judge Bruce Imbacuan has granted asylum in 0% of the 105 cases he's heard. In San Francisco, judge Gordon Louis has granted asylum in 99% of the 208 cases he's heard. Here are the numbers for all immigration courts with more than 2,000 cases over the past six years:

That's a range of 5% to 67%, and none of this is because of a few outlier judges. Each of these courts has ten or more judges and the data is for the past six years of decisions.

This is a church in Redlands. It is on a hill. Therefore it is called the Church on the Hill. I like the fact that they didn't overthink this.