Month: November 2023

Ohio, these days, is a solidly red state. And yet, yesterday Ohioans went to the polls and approved an abortion rights initiative by 57-43%. What gives?

The answer is simple, but maybe not obvious. Last year Ohio passed a law (currently in court) that bans abortion after six weeks. This is effectively a complete abortion ban since most women barely even know they're pregnant by then—and it's very unpopular. Nationally, huge majorities think abortion should be legal during the first 13 weeks of pregnancy:

This number might be a bit lower in Ohio, but I'll bet it's still well over half. This means Ohio voters had only two choices:

• Abortion banned after 6 weeks (effectively a total ban)
• Abortion generally legal at all stages of pregnancy, but can be restricted after fetal viability

Many voters might not have thought either of these choices was ideal, but they still had to choose. And given these choices, they chose to make abortion generally legal.

If conservatives were willing to pass laws that banned abortion only after the first trimester, I'll bet they wouldn't be losing so many referendums. But they aren't. And they're learning, to their regret, that even fence-sitters prefer mostly legal to mostly banned.

Bad news! The number of workplace injuries increased from 2.2 million in 2021 to 2.3 million in 2022. However, the rate of injuries stayed the same:

The most dangerous occupation in 2022 was transportation and warehousing. Finance had the fewest injuries:

The nanny state is at it again:

???? The federal government has mandated that all vehicles sold after 2026 must have a kill switch that can disable your vehicle based on your driving performance.

My amendment to defund that unconstitutional mandate failed tonight.

Here is the roll call:https://t.co/YWufj9BuMv

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) November 8, 2023

This tweet generated a ton of responses from conservative followers who were outraged at the idea that the government is going to monitor your driving and activate a "kill switch" if it doesn't approve. But that isn't what's really happening. Here's the skinny:

• This is solely about reducing drunk driving. It was part of the 2021 infrastructure bill.
• Cars will be fitted with devices that (a) detect alcohol in the air via sensors in the door and (b) measure blood alcohol levels via infrared lights in the ignition button.
• If you are over the legal limit, your car will start but it won't move.
• This is entirely in-car tech. Neither the police nor anyone else has access to it.
• The IIHS estimates it will save 9,000 lives per year.

You can decide for yourself what you think of this. But you should at least know what's really going on.

And that's that. In Virginia, Democrats have maintained control of the State Senate and flipped control of the House of Delegates away from Republicans:

That makes tonight nearly a clean sweep for Democrats. Among major races, Republicans won only the governorship of Mississippi, and that was never really in serious doubt.

Peter Coy links today to a new paper that tries to untangle why educated voters identify so strongly as Democrats. This hasn't always been the case, and the paper's authors are able to identify the changing trend going back a very long way thanks to a massive database of polling that starts during World War II:

In 1940 a person with a college degree was 8% less likely to identify as a Democrat than a Republican. By 1960 this had increased to about 14%.

Then things started to turn around. By the early aughts the two parties were even, and today voters with a college degree are 14% more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans.

In other words, the increasing identification of educated voters with the Democratic Party is nothing new. It goes all the way back to 1960 and then really picks up steam at the inflection point of 1976.

Why? The authors believe it's because Democrats started supporting free-market economics, which appeals to educated voters more than it does to less educated voters. To make up for this, Democrats started supporting ever bigger welfare outlays in order to lighten the inequality produced by free-market economics. But it turns out this also appeals more to educated voters than to the less educated.

I'm not sure I buy this, but it's a topic for another day.

Ohio voters have decided to put a right to abortion in their constitution. Kentucky voters have reelected their Democratic governor. A Democrat won the Pennsylvania race for its Supreme Court. The Virginia legislature is still up for grabs. Texas voters are merrily voting for every single initiative on the ballot except for one that would raise the retirement age for judges. Make of that what you will.

Overall, it looks like a decent night for liberals. But Virginia will make or break things.

LATE POSTSCRIPT: Democrats have won 20 out of 40 seats in the Virginia state Senate and will probably win another one or two. This means Republicans won't control everything. Dems also look like they might even squeak out a majority in the House of Delegates too.

A team of researchers released a paper recently (here) that tries to quantify how much different digital services are worth to their users. For example, here's the relative value of nine different services:

Google search was the top service, beating out even meeting your friends in person. TikTok, oddly, has a low value despite its huge popularity. It may be popular, but apparently its users could do without it pretty easily.

Next the researchers put a dollar value on each service. They did this by asking people randomly if they'd accept a certain amount to stop using Facebook for a month. Then they took the average "willing to accept" value, multiplied by 12 to get an annual figure, and adjusted each service for its value relative to Facebook. Finally they added up all ten services (the ones above plus Snapchat). Here's how it came out in various countries:

There are a couple of obvious ways you can interpret this:

• It's bullshit. There's no way the average person values these services at $5,000 or so. That's close to 10% of their income!
• This is the consumer welfare generated by these services, not the amount people would actually pay for them. It suggests that we're understating GDP by not including online services at the full value of their consumer welfare.

I don't know which is the better interpretation. Maybe both. These numbers do seem awfully high, though.

NOTE: All of this data is based on a survey done in Facebook, so these are estimates of value by Facebook users. That's certainly different than estimates of value for the whole population.

As we were driving up Highway 160 to Durango a few weeks ago we could see the Ship Rock in the far distance. Ship Rock is an "iconic and religiously significant Navajo Nation monadnock that rises over 1,500 ft into the air," but from a distance I remarked that it looked like the Emerald City rising out of the plain. So here is a picture that's been altered a wee bit to give it more of an emerald look. A more conventional view is at the bottom.

During Donald Trump's presidency crime skyrocketed. Mental illness among teens soared. In Charlottesville racists and Proud Boys rioted. American soldiers continued to be killed in an Afghanistan war that seemed endless. North Korea tested new missiles that could reach the US mainland. Foreign leaders fretted that America could no longer be trusted. Thousands of Trump followers led an insurrection aimed at keeping Trump in power even though he lost the election. Trump himself kept the nation perpetually on edge with ever more unhinged tweets at all hours of the day and night.

Under President Biden crime has subsided. The economy is strong and unemployment is low. Manufacturing is making a comeback, infrastructure is being repaired and rebuilt, and America is making its biggest ever investment in green energy. Under Biden's direction, the Western alliance has been united against Russian aggression in Ukraine and the US is once again respected overseas. The war in Afghanistan is over. Insurrectionists have been put in prison. Republican threats to breach the debt ceiling have been quietly put to rest. At long last, temper tantrums have been replaced with understated leadership.

Last year the Supreme Court ruled that gun restrictions are constitutional only if they are based on America's "historical tradition" of firearm regulation. So how about a law that bans gun ownership by people who are subject to restraining orders for domestic violence?

The Fifth Circuit Court, home of conservative wet dreams, naturally ruled that this ban had no historical basis and was therefore unconstitutional. So the question is: The Supreme Court may be conservative, but is it that conservative? The answer appears to be no:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed ready to rule that the government may disarm people subject to domestic violence orders.

Several conservative justices, during a lively argument, seemed to be searching for a narrow rationale.... But they seemed prepared to accept that a judicial finding of dangerousness was sufficient to support the law even if there was no measure from the founding era precisely like the one at issue in the case.

It's a measure of how extreme the Fifth Circuit has gotten that they are routinely overturned by the most conservative Supreme Court in memory. In this case, the net result is still going to be a considerable loosening of US gun laws, but not quite so loose as to be nonsensical. Count your blessings.