Month: November 2023

The Wall Street Journal suggests the Fed will make a U-turn on interest rates soon:

Twenty months after the Federal Reserve began a historic campaign against inflation, investors now believe there is a much greater chance that the central bank will cut rates in just four months than raise them again in the foreseeable future. Interest-rate futures indicated Monday a 52% chance the Fed will lower rates by at least a quarter-of-a-percentage point by its May 2024 policy meeting.

That would be good news. It would be even better news if the Fed did it sooner. The interest rate hikes of last year are likely to start having an impact soon and the signs of a recession are mounting. Youth unemployment has spiked, personal savings are dropping, investment has stagnated, and the yield curve is staying stubbornly and deeply inverted:

At the same time, inflation looks to be well under control:

I've never been a big believer in "forward guidance," but I do believe a bit in ordinary old animal spirits. High interest rates are going to do what they do no matter what the Fed does now, but a reduction in interest rates could have at least a small impact on optimism that affects spending and investment. The sooner it happens the better.

I like Vox. It could use a little more editing to get word lengths down, but they often run interesting pieces with plenty of detail and backup data.

However, they are also the online home of wokeness—and sometimes it's just too heavy-handed to ignore. Today, for example, I was reading a lengthy piece about falling global fertility rates and the success of government programs to turn this trend around. (Short answer: nothing works.) Then, right after describing a program in Taiwan, this comes out of the blue:

In the US, meanwhile, rhetoric aimed at getting people to have more children can ring hollow given a racist history in which white motherhood has been lauded while Black women’s fertility has been viewed as disordered and suspect, to the point that Black women have been forcibly sterilized. In a country where Black women die in childbirth at nearly three times the rate of white women, it’s impossible to hear calls to increase the birth rate without questioning who they’re really aimed at.

People sometimes ask for a definition of woke. This is it. It's great to be awake to the way society treats Black people and other minority groups unfairly. It's not great to try and shoehorn this in as an explanation for absolutely everything. It's stuff like this that gives woke a bad reputation, even among many non-conservatives.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, on the issue of maternal mortality the evidence suggests pretty strongly that the high rate of death among Black mothers isn't due to racism. The real reason remains a mystery, but a best guess is that it has to do with circulatory problems that are more widespread among the Black population than either the white or Hispanic population.

This is US 160 just east of Tuba City in Arizona.

Jean Guerrero, a columnist for the LA Times, recently took her iPhone in for service:

As I drove around to various errands, I awoke to details of the real world that I’d long ago stopped noticing: the faces of strangers in cars behind me at traffic stops, my steering wheel’s leather, the ethereal whiteness of ordinary clouds. Without social media to occupy me at all times, my mind went empty: gloriously empty, with space for nature and new ideas. It was exhilarating. Suddenly, anything seemed possible.

Wow. That's some detox—though I don't understand how this happened on the drive home. She never used social media in her car in the first place, did she? But it got even better a few days later at a dance retreat she attended:

The next morning, eating breakfast with my classmates on a sun-dappled patio, I noticed a large praying mantis on the ground, its body the yellow-green of a ripe lime.... The insect was crawling toward the dining hall door, where it could be crushed. I knelt down to move it to safety, charmed by its resemblance to foliage and its worshipful pose. I hadn’t seen one in years. I wondered how many small wonders I’d missed while staring at my phone.

....The praying mantis offered an answer. Simply noticing was enough. Attention to nuance and in-between spaces could make existence sacred.

That's some heavy shit. I myself have never been addicted enough to social media to get a big benefit from giving it up, but now I think maybe I've missed out. I need to sign up for TikTok and Instagram—I already have Facebook and Twitter—and start using them 24/7 just so that I can quit after a few months. Only then will I notice the in-between spaces that make existence sacred.

A few days ago the Wall Street Journal asked a bunch of college students to write about why we don't trust science anymore. Why? Beats me, but apparently they poll the youth of America every week on some subject or another. In any case, pretty much everyone agreed that the answer was COVID. But they disagreed about exactly why. Aidan Olcott of the University of Colorado said scientists have no one but themselves to blame:

Suddenly, in March 2020, science was thrust onto the national stage. Science, they said, is why healthy children and young adults must stay locked in their homes. Science, they said, is why you must mask and double-mask. Science is why a person must quarantine for two weeks following a Covid diagnosis. Or maybe it’s 10 days....While the public lived in desperation, scientists and bureaucrats felt no need to explain and no need to apologize. For the public to forgive them now, they must first offer a public apology.

Scientists must apologize! But Elizabeth Ghartey of the University of Arizona put the blame elsewhere:

Political grandstanding has only intensified public distrust in scientists, and it doesn’t seem to be fading. During the Covid pandemic, Donald Trump ignored early mitigation guidelines, vilified scientists such as Anthony Fauci, promoted discredited treatments and undermined the reputation of vaccines. Mr. Trump’s administration trivialized the severity of climate change too, despite resounding calls for action from the scientific community.

What none of the kids did, however, was look at some actual data. Here, for example, is the difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to confidence in the scientific community:

Up through 2000 there was little partisan difference. In fact, Republicans were a little more confident in science. That flattened out by the early aughts and the gap began to grow steadily. Then, in 2021, when COVID hit, it exploded. There is now a 30-point difference between Democrats and Republicans.

In other words, it's not true that "we" have lost confidence in science. Republicans have. Democrats actually have more confidence in science these days.

As for the reason, I don't think that's hard to suss out. Science is inconvenient for Republicans, so they go after the scientists. That's all there is to it.

Only a third of Republicans think that COVID-19 vaccines are safe. But then again, they're also skeptical of flu and RSV vaccines. They just don't seem to trust vaccines much.

I got pointed to a Washington Post editorial today which suggests that political polarization is hurting marriage rates because young women are considerably more liberal than young men. I'm not so sure that's a big issue, but what really drew my attention was this:

A growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners. As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, (1) higher unemployment, (2) lower rates of educational attainment, (3) more drug addiction and (4) deaths of despair, and (5) generally less purpose and direction in their lives.

I don't know how to measure #5, but I can measure the others and they are literally all untrue:

Among young men, unemployment is historically low; educational attainment is high at every level; and drug use is stable. It's true that so-called deaths of despair are up, but they're up less than they are for young women.

This meme about slacker young men just won't quit even though the evidence for it is zero. When are people going to cut the crap?

POSTSCRIPT: I suppose I might as well throw this one in too:

How much does it cost to "fill up" an electric car? That depends on two things: the efficiency of the car and the cost of electricity. Assuming that 300 miles equals a "full tank," here's the cost for a sample of cars and states:

This was inspired by a friend who was complaining about the high cost of charging his new Nissan Ariya. Sure enough, it's about 40 bucks since he lives in San Diego, which has some of the most expensive residential electricity in the nation.

On the bright side, a Tesla Model 3 in Wyoming will take you 300 miles for only $8. Location, location, location.

Emily Hand, a 9-year-old Irish girl, was released by Hamas yesterday. The taoiseach of Ireland released a statement:

Twitter went nuts. This girl wasn't "lost"! She was kidnapped! Held hostage! How dare the leader of Ireland insult Israel this way!?!

Here's the next paragraph:

This is typical of the discourse these days. The LA Times has another example today. A few days ago a Jewish professor at USC confronted a group of protesters and declared, “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.”

Some people will find that objectionable on its own. But that wasn't enough:

Within hours, Strauss’ comments were posted online, shared and reshared on X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

As his remarks raced across the internet, his condemnation of Hamas was often excised, leaving only his “hope” for “all” to be killed. Captions and comments online framed his demand for “every one” to be killed in myriad, at times deceptive, ways. One Instagram post shared to millions of users claimed falsely that Strauss told the students, “[I] hope you get killed....”

He was quickly banned from campus amid calls for him to be fired.

I guess the moral of the story is not to believe everything you see on the internet. Or anywhere else, for that matter. But that's hardly news, nor is it advice that anyone pays attention to when it doesn't suit them. Welcome to the world of human beings.

The good news for Nikki Haley is that she's risen from 5% to 10% in the polls:

The bad news is that in September she was 47 points behind Trump. Today, with Trump doing barely anything aside from writing unhinged posts on Truth Social, she's 49 points behind.