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Month: August 2023

Published on 37 Comments on Here’s the latest version of “Kids these days have lousy work skills”

American workers—especially fresh graduates—aren't learning the skills they need for today's marketplace. How do I know this? Because the Wall Street Journal tells me so:

The New Hires of 2023 Are Unprepared for Work

The knock-on effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country....The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.

This could be true. On the other hand, employers have been griping forever about the lousy skills of kids these days. For example:

Maybe remote learning during the pandemic really has generated a cohort of undertrained new workers. Or, just maybe, the kids are pretty much the same as always, while employers are annoyed as always that entry-level workers have to learn stuff. It's your call.

Published on 40 Comments on It wasn’t just Trump who wanted a coup

In honor of Donald Trump's latest indictment, I want to remind everyone of something. Although Vice President Mike Pence declined to accept Trump's fake slates of electors when Congress met to certify the presidential vote on January 6, the same wasn't true of Republicans in general. A total of 59% of House Republicans supported objections to the count in Arizona and 68% did so in Pennsylvania.¹

The Electoral Count Act, passed last year, will stop this kind of stuff in the future. But 96% of House Republicans voted against it.

Bottom line: It's not just Trump. We have an entire political party that went along with the coup attempt. There were just enough non-corrupt Republicans to stop it, but it was a close run thing.

¹The numbers were much lower among Republican senators. I don't know why.

Published on 20 Comments on Today’s mystery: Rental vacancies and rent are both up in Q2

This is kind of odd. The Census Bureau reports that rental vacancies are up. This should mean lower rents, but Zillow reports that rent is on the rise:

Note that vacancy rates are for large cities and rent is for all urban areas.

In any case, I don't quite know what to make of this. Vacancies are up 6% and rent is up 1.1% over the past quarter. But if there are more vacancies, why are prices rising?

Published on 33 Comments on How rugged is your state?

I was diddling around, as one does, on the website of the Department of Agriculture and came across a new report called "Characterizing Rugged Terrain in the United States." My first thought was the same as yours: Why does the USDA care about rugged terrain? I mean, the Post Office, sure. The Interior Department, sure. Maybe even the Army. But why the Agriculture Department?

We will probably never know, but in any case I bet you're curious about how your state stacks up, ruggedness-wise. Here you go:

Louisiana is the flattest state and West Virginia is the most rugged. Surprisingly, California ranks pretty high too. In fact, the West Coast has by far the largest amount of really rugged territory and really rugged roads:

No other region is even in double digits, but 25% of the West Coast is super-rugged and so are 37% of its roads. I would not have guessed that!

Anyway, this is your tax dollars at work. Enjoy.

Published on 7 Comments on A new meta-review confirms the link between lead and crime

There are two types of studies about the association of lead and crime. The first is an ecological study that compares lead levels in a population of children to later crime levels in the same population. The second is an individual study that follows specific children to adulthood and compares each child's lead level to their later criminal history.

Ecological studies are common and show strong evidence that childhood lead poisoning leads to criminal behavior later in life. Individual studies are rarer, and today a paper was published that summarizes the results of every known individual study—17 in all. However, it's not a conventional meta-study since it doesn't attempt to combine the studies into a single result. It's more of a simple qualitative review. The conclusion was pretty clear:

The range of outcomes that were significantly associated with lead exposure [7 of the studies] were primarily related to an arrest, incarceration, or conviction of some type, with increasing blood lead concentrations in childhood prospectively associated with later arrests and convictions in several studies. In addition to this association, 7 studies found strong associations between lead exposure and later delinquent or aggressive behavior irrespective of arrest status....Even in reviewed studies in which statistically significant associations between lead and crime did not exist [2 of the studies], significant relationships between lead and damaging patterns of behavior that are more likely to lead to negative long-term outcomes were still present.

....This review demonstrates an association between exposure to lead and the later development of delinquent, antisocial, and criminal behavior. Although borderline levels of risk are seen in several of our included studies, most are above the null value and estimates of risk are generally precise.

However:

A shift from lower to higher effect estimates as magnitude of lead exposure increased [i.e., a dose-response effect] was a common and not unexpected outcome in our review. This finding is commensurate with existing ecological literature, although the magnitude of the effect size was much lower in our reviewed studies than that seen in ecological ones.

In summary:

  • Overall, there is an association between lead and crime in individual studies.
  • Even studies that don't show an association with crime show an association with delinquent and antisocial behavior, which themselves are associated with criminal behavior.
  • Most studies showed a dose-response relationship. That is, higher lead levels predicted higher crime rates.
  • The increase in effect size from higher lead levels is not as dramatic as that shown by ecological studies.

In other words, this is yet more evidence for the link between lead and crime. But the link might be a little weaker than we thought.

Published on 59 Comments on Trump now up to three indictments with fourth looming

I see that Donald Trump has just been indicted for illegally conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. This means we're now up to three Trump indictments, with a fourth from Georgia almost certainly on its way soon. This really is unprecedented, but then again, Trump has engaged in an unprecedented amount of crime.

Will we end up sending a 77-year-old man to prison? That would be unusual. But as the saying goes, don't do the crime if you can't do the time. Nobody forced Trump to do any of this stuff.

Published on 32 Comments on Why has trust in the military dropped recently?

Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty notes a Gallup poll showing that public confidence in the military has declined lately:

As the perception developed that progressives have taken over the top brass in the military, the most important cohort for military recruiting — existing military families — has been pulling away from the U.S. military as an institution.

That's not really a serious response, but it raises the question of what did cause the decline—which is real. Here's a time trend from the General Social Survey:

Confidence in the military is down 15 percentage points since 2018, though some of this is due to normal reversion after an artificial spike in confidence following the 2017 strike on Syria. Given the timeframe, the most obvious possibility is that it's due to some kind of COVID effect, but if that were the case public confidence would have declined in everything, not just the military.

This got me curious, so I took a look at the 2018-22 decline in confidence for everything that GSS asks about. It's worth noting that some institutions had such low confidence already (Congress at 6%, for example) that they really couldn't decline very much. So the only way to measure this properly is to calculate the percentage change from their starting points in 2018. Here it is:

The military doesn't look all that special now. It went from 61% to 46%, a drop of one quarter, or 25%, which puts it right in the middle even though it's coming off an artificial spike.

I don't know why COVID did this. Maybe people just express lower confidence in institutions when they feel frustrated and scared. But whatever the reason, COVID seems like the culprit, not wokeness, and the military doesn't look to have done any worse than average.

Published on 8 Comments on Construction spending was flat in June

Construction spending continues to be flat over the past few months:

The good news is that residential construction isn't falling anymore. The bad news is that nonresidential construction isn't rising anymore. We are just puttering along waiting for either something or nothing to happen later this year.