Month: September 2023

This is the Los Angeles skyline at dusk seen from Angeles Crest Highway. About a third of the way from the right-hand border you can see downtown with Catalina Island behind it.

While I was puttering around in the GSS data for my previous post, I happened to take a look at self-reported political ideology. In particular, I looked at how many Republicans described themselves as conservative and how many Democrats described themselves as liberal. Here it is:

Republicans have been growing steadily more conservative for 50 years. During this time, the share saying they are conservative has grown by 29 points, from 44% to 73%.

Democrats, by contrast, had a long stretch of time from 1990-2015 when nothing much changed. But starting in 2016 their liberalism shot up. Over the entire 50 year period, the share saying they are liberal has grown by 27 points, from 34% to 61%.

Put another way: since 2016 Democrats have moved substantially leftward while Republicans have barely moved at all.

Put in yet another way: over the entire 50-year period, both parties have moved equally in opposite directions. But Republicans did it first.

According to the General Social Survey, here's the trend in people reporting that they aren't very happy:

I struggle to reconcile this with reports that young people are depressed, stressed out, and generally kind of miserable. From 1970 through 2018, there was very little change in young adults reporting that they aren't happy. It bounces around in the range of 10-15% the entire time. And even if you assume that the effect of the pandemic is permanent (which is unlikely), this has increased by only 5% since then.

This doesn't mean that reports of mental distress among young adults are wrong. It just means there's a disconnect of some kind. In the GSS survey, their level of unhappiness is about the same as everyone else and it hasn't changed much over 50 years aside from the COVID years. I would very much like for someone to figure out what's going on here.

From Kevin McCarthy at a closed-door meeting of the Republican caucus, daring hard-right loonies to oust him:

You guys think I’m scared of a motion to vacate. Go f---ing ahead and do it. I’m not scared.

You tell 'em, Kevin.

The Wall Street Journal says oil prices are "soaring":

Hmmm. Here is the spot price of West Texas Intermediate since the beginning of the year:

It's up about 10%, from $77 to $87. The Journal got its much larger number by (a) using the NYMEX future price, and (b) cherry picking the start of the chart at the very lowest point of the year. Does this help readers understand what's really going on? Or does it help to see a little bit more?

It appears to be a thing lately for CEOs to blurt out their frustration over the fact that their workers want raises. "Nobody wants to work anymore" is the usual refrain. Or, since unemployment is demonstrably low, perhaps they admit that people are working, they just aren't working very hard. But it ain't true:

Productivity is mostly the result of improved equipment, but it would nonetheless go down if there was some kind of mass shirking in the workplace. Obviously there isn't. Labor productivity right now is above its pre-pandemic trend. So maybe we all cut the crap about lazy workers who got a little too full of themselves during the pandemic?

The August spike in inflation was obviously bad news, but there's a bit of positive news in today's figures too:

Inflation in goods has been below 2% for the entire past year, and last month's spike was the result of a transitory rise in gasoline prices. Nothing much to worry about. But inflation in services remained stubbornly high until it fell below 4% in May. In August there was no spike in services inflation.

Inflation in services has been our key problem ever since supply chain pressure eased up last year. It's good news that nothing much happened to it in August.

This is our nation's Capitol, where every day our elected representatives undertake their solemn duty to advance the public weal. It brings a flutter to your heart, doesn't it?

At the time I was there, the Capitol building was covered in scaffolding. This angle, along with the intervening flora, is a clever way of taking a picture with no scaffolding in view.

Over at National Review, Charles Cooke approvingly cites this passage from a recent David Ignatius column about Joe Biden:

He should have stopped his son Hunter from joining the board of a Ukrainian gas company and representing companies in China — and he certainly should have resisted Hunter’s attempts to impress clients by getting Dad on the phone.

This is offered up as.......something. Cooke doesn't come right out and claim it's impeachable behavior, but that's the gist of his piece. This is a remarkable movement of the goalposts: high crimes and misdemeanors be damned, Biden should be impeached for not stopping Hunter's (legal) foreign activities and not knowing that Hunter sometimes had his pals in the room when they talked on the phone.

But you can't have it both ways. Biden says he didn't discuss business with Hunter, and if that's the case he couldn't have counseled Hunter to stand down. He could only have done that if he did talk business with Hunter, but Republicans all insist he shouldn't have done that.

This stuff is getting completely ridiculous. Do conservatives seriously think Biden should be impeached for not doing something six years before he became president? Come on. This is inane.

Adjusted for inflation, hourly earnings declined at an annual rate of 5.3% in August. However, the average number of hours worked rose, so weekly earnings were down only 1.2%.

Weekly earnings are now 0.3% above their pre-pandemic level.

For blue-collar workers, hourly earnings were down 4.9% and weekly earnings were down 1.5%.