Month: November 2023

A few days ago the Washington Post ran a story about some high school teachers in Washington state who wanted to stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. It all started when one of the teachers was listening to a podcast:

The Black hosts of the show joked that “Mockingbird” ranked with Confederate monuments as something painful to Black people, but which White people adored. Johnson, who grew up loving “Mockingbird,” identifying with White protagonist Scout, felt shaken — and guilty.

Another one of the teachers heard complaints from her Black students:

Students shared their discomfort with the way the 1960 novel about racial injustice portrays Black people: One Black teen said the book misrepresented him and other African Americans, according to meeting records reviewed by The Washington Post. Another complained the novel did not move her, because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.

My immediate reaction to this was probably pretty common: Give me a break. It's a book about the ugliness of racism! But unlike a lot of stories like this, this one kept gnawing at me. I'd never argue that TKM is a bad book, or even an insensitive book. But it is a book that's 60 years old set in a small Alabama town nearly 100 years ago. And it got me wondering: Why do we all stay so doggedly attached to books from our own childhoods? Why do we resist so strongly the idea that while there's nothing terribly wrong with them, they may no longer be right for the present day?

It's probably been a while since you read TKM. Or maybe you've only seen the movie. What you remember is Atticus Finch, the white lawyer who defies the scorn of his neighbors to defend an innocent Black man charged with raping a white girl. A Black man named.......um, let's see. What was his name again?

Tom Robinson. But I'll be honest: I had to look that up. Tom Robinson may have been treated sympathetically by Harper Lee, but he doesn't have a whole lot of agency in the book. Hell, it's nearly 200 pages before we meet him even briefly.

Elsewhere, the n-word is used casually dozens of times. Black people are treated as superstitious, illiterate, and submissive. Calpurnia is an exception, but for all that she's still just Atticus's cook and maid. All of this might very well be historically accurate for the book's time and place, but does that mean Black kids of the present day feel like having their faces rubbed in it?

In any case, the more I thought about it the more I found myself on the side of the teachers who no longer wanted to use TKM in their classrooms. Partly this is because of how Black characters are portrayed, but it's more because we oldsters stay attached to things for way too long. This is not Shakespeare. It's just a mostly good book that has had its day and won't be missed if high school kids read something else instead. That's not so hard, is it?

Los Angeles has been trying to do something with the Los Angeles River forever. But it's hard, partly because renovation is expensive and partly because it seems like every single human being in the city has a different idea about what should be done.

For example, the LA Times reports today about one teensy-tiny part of the project: a three-mile bike path along the river that connects two other stretches of bike path. It's gone through city council review with no objection. A 630-page environmental impact report was finished two years ago. $58 million has been allocated. But now there's a new hiccup: the bike path will lop off a strip of land in a nearby dog park and its users are up in arms. Here's what the bike path will do:

Yep, it will cut off a strip of land so small no one would even notice it if they weren't told ahead of time. But 2,000 people are now using this as an excuse to oppose the bike path.

That's democracy for you, I suppose. But you'd really think people would have better things to do.

Tomorrow Ohio votes on Issue 1, an initiative that protects the right to abortion. Over at National Review, Jack Butler has this to say about it:

The vague language is designed as a battering ram to be used against all of the state’s existing regulations of abortion, including the currently tied-up-in-the-courts heartbeat bill and the 24-hour waiting period, as well as parental-notification and -consent laws

....But it would not stop there. Rachel Citak, president of Cincinnati Right to Life, said that virtually anything that regulates abortion “can be regarded as something that discriminates, that penalizes, burdens, or prohibits” the procedure and therefore would be threatened by Issue 1’s passage.

....Issue 1 passage would also pave the way for taxpayer-funded abortion. The language of the amendment is, again, vague enough, in this case about the meaning of “burden,” that one’s inability to pay for an abortion could qualify.

In an unusual turnaround, I agree almost completely with an NR take on something. The only difference is that all of this sounds great to me. To paraphrase Grover Norquist, I don't want to abolish the regulation of abortion. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. I'll be happy when abortion is treated about the same as having your tonsils removed.

Did you know that in America parties always get at least eight years in the White House before they're voted out? Of course you do. Aside from Donald Trump, the only time it hasn't happened since 1900 is Jimmy Carter's presidency.

I know that things are kind of crazy these days, but this is still a predictive observation that has a lot of force behind it. If we can avoid a recession, it probably still does.

POSTSCRIPT: Election forecasts based on fundamentals aren't too useful this far out, but there are two that are already forecasting. Ray Fair's model gives Biden 51.03% of the popular vote. David Walker gives Biden 53.7% and 272 electoral votes.

This is the Ferris wheel at the Spectrum, an outdoor shopping mall near me. It's a surprisingly difficult picture to take because the wheel is hemmed in on all sides and trees are in the way. For this shot, I had to get in close and then take four separate frames that were later stitched together in Photoshop.

Tyler Cowen points to a new paper which suggests that working from home during the COVID pandemic produced more deterioration in mental health than working at a workplace. In particular, WFH has negative effects on loneliness, depression, and life satisfaction. This is intriguing, but here's the key sentence:

When considering all three dimensions of mental health together, WFH causes a 0.087 standard deviation increase in the overall measure of mental health deterioration compared to WP.

Hmmm. This is about like finding a height increase from 5'10" to 5'10¼". Even if it's (barely) statistically significant in a technical sense, the result is driven almost entirely by an increase in loneliness—which is hardly unexpected—and the overall effect size is simply too small to take very seriously. That's especially true in a paper like this one, which relies on a mountain of model building, statistical interventions, measurement of unobserved abilities, and variable controls.

There might be something here, but I'd want to see some pretty clear confirmation before I really believed it.

The Wall Street Journal, that great chronicler of business class whining, has yet another new trend to report:

The white-collar labor market is softening to a point that companies are encountering an issue that would have been unthinkable in the era known as the Great Resignation. These days, too few people are voluntarily leaving their jobs.

Sigh. Here are the numbers:

Quits have indeed dropped. They are now at precisely the level of January 2020, right before the pandemic.

The bizarre thing is that the Journal article includes this exact chart. Like mine, it shows that quits are the same right now as they were in January 2020. It also shows that the average quit rate since 2000 is 2.0%, so quits are still at a higher rate than average right now. They know all this, but they wrote the article anyway.

Too many quits, too few quits, not the right kind of quits. It's always something.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, people are generally more likely to quit in good times (easy to find a better job) and less likely to quit during recessions. The reduction in the quit rate has hardly reached crisis proportions—it went down to 1.7% during the dotcom bust recession and 1.2% during the Great Recession—but the fact that it's declining does indicate that workers are more worried about the economy these days.

Today's New York Times has an article about how COVID has slashed commuting times. But has it? Here's long-term data from the American Time Use Survey:

Nothing much happened. Commuting time started to decline in 2017 and continued declining at the same rate during the pandemic. Which is odd, because ATUS confirms that, in fact, fewer people are on the road:

In 2017-19, the number of commuters was dead flat and commuting time dropped by 54 seconds per year. In 2019-22 the number of commuters fell by a sixth and commuting dropped by......

48 seconds per year.

This is a mystery. It's also suggestive that the share of in-office work has fallen by a sixth. That's a fair amount, but it doesn't really come close to explaining the implosion of occupied office space in cities, which seems to have dropped by nearly half. It's another mystery.

Hey, Donald Trump is testifying today in his civil fraud trial. How's that going?

Trump is making a long ode to Aberdeen, calling it an “artistic expression,” and the greatest golf course ever built.... Justice Engoron finally loses patience and breaks in as Trump is calling Aberdeen, Scotland, where he has a golf club, the oil capital of Europe. “Irrelevant, irrelevant. Answer the question,” the judge says.

Please go on:

Kise, Trump's lawer, has made sure to praise his client's responses. He called one “brilliant,” and another a “great answer.”

....At this point, Trump is no longer answering questions being posed by Wallace. Instead, Trump is turning his answers into direct attacks on the judge. He continues to point directly at Engoron who is sitting quietly, for now.

“He called me a fraud and he didn’t know anything about me,” Trump says of Engoron, after the judge asks Trump to stop talking about the disclaimers and answer the questions. The judge then suggested that Trump hadn’t read the order where he found him liable for fraud. Trump seems to be losing control.

“You believed this political hack back there and that’s unfortunate,” Trump says to the judge of [Letitia] James. “Done,” asks Kevin Wallace? “Done,” says the former president, and the question continues.

And from the Washington Post:

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron pointedly urged Donald Trump’s lawyer to control his client, repeatedly asking the former president to stay on topic and avoid making long-winded political statements during his testimony.... “Mr. Kise, can you control your client?” Engoron said. “This is not a political rally. This is a courtroom.”

....Kise took a $3 million retainer to join Trump’s legal team and made sure he was paid upfront. He has clashed with other Trump lawyers. He’s largely been quiet as his client has attacked the judge and court staff. It will be challenging now to rein Trump in.

Whatever else you can say, Trump's sure isn't helping himself with his testimony. He just can't stand being in a situation where he's not allowed to say and do anything he wants.

A study last month done by Swiss Re for Waymo suggests that self-driving Waymo cars are far, far safer than human drivers:

I have long recommended that if you want to evaluate the state of autonomous cars, look at Waymo. Forget about Tesla or Cruise or any of the others. They may do certain things well or poorly, but Waymo is the state of the art.

Note that this chart is based solely on miles driven with no human behind the steering wheel. It is 100% autonomous driving. And as many others have already pointed out, autonomous cars will get better every year. Humans won't.

But this does make me wonder: When are we all going to be able to buy driverless cars using Waymo technology? At this point, Waymo:

• Works on city streets.
• Works on highways.
• Has been tested in San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
• Is able to drive, park, let you off at the curb, and reliably take instructions about where to go.
• Is extremely safe.

So what's left? I suppose there's still work to be done to make the radar stuff smaller and cheaper, but is that all? It sure seems like Waymo is very, very close to being able to sell this stuff on the consumer market.

I want one.