Month: November 2023

I know this is hardly a brilliant insight, but I continue to be sort of stunned by how absolutist Americans are—or seem to be, anyway—on the subject of Israel and its enemies. It hardly requires a scholar's dedication to nuance to understand that both sides have acted horrifically at various times over the past century. There are no heroes in this story and no clean hands.

I get that tribalism accounts for much of this, but the sins of both sides are so numerous and so appalling that it's hard to see how anybody can be a die-hard supporter of either one. The best I can bring myself to believe is that perhaps one side is slightly less repellent than the other.¹

¹In my view, Israel is the less horrible. But it's hardly a slam dunk.

UPDATE: Judging from a couple of the comments, I think there's a real problem of ahistoricity working here. If you start the clock in 2001, you can make a good case that Israel has been the more ruthless actor. This isn't a slam dunk either, but it's entirely defensible.

But if you start the clock in 1948—and you have to for any of this to make sense—it becomes way, way harder to make this case (unless you're a die-hard who continues to believe that Israel never had a right to exist in the first place). Over the whole history of Israel's existence, the record of Arab wars, blockades, terrorism, and crude antisemitism just overwhelms Israel's sometimes harsh and indefensible actions.

Our garage still has its original garage door. It's old school: a flat hunk of wood that levers upward on a hinge to open.

Marian has long wanted to replace it with a modern roll-up paneled door, but I've resisted because the old one is fine. Why bother? But luckily for her, some house painters recently power washed the door and tore off huge hunks of wood at the bottom. They appear to think that painting over this damage makes everything fine, so now Marian has the better of our argument. The old door isn't fine, so maybe we finally need a new, termite-free metal roll-up door.

Which is fine. I knew I couldn't hold out forever. But I still have one complaint left: our old-style door opens fully in five seconds. Yes, I've timed it. Roll-up doors take ten seconds. But why? I can't come up with any good reason that they have to open at such a snail's pace. A Google search comes up with loads of hits for (allegedly) high-speed roll-up doors, but they're all for commercial doors, not residential garages.

Does anyone what the deal is here? If you open a roll-up door by hand you can do it very quickly. So it's got nothing to do with the mechanics of the door. It's just that garage door openers are slow. Why?

T-Mobile has a feature that transcribes voice mail and then texts it to you. I imagine other mobile carriers do the same. Overall it's remarkably good, but it does have a weak spot: names.

I frequently get messages from Kaiser Permanente that begin "This call is for Kevin Drum." The last four of them have been transcribed as Kevin Dum, Kevin Durham, Kevin Drones, and Kevin Jerome. Clearly there's still some work to be done.

This is according to the Gaza Ministry of Health through November 10th and the Government Media Office after November 22:

Since the beginning of November Israel has been killing a very steady 300 Palestinians per day.

How's the infrastructure bill coming along? It passed in late 2021 and allocated $550 billion in new spending over eight years. That's about $70 billion per year. Here's actual spending:

Adjusted for inflation, public construction spending had been trending downward when the infrastructure bill was passed. A few months later spending ticked up and is already a little more $50 billion above its low point on an annualized basis. Relative to trend it's $100 billion higher. Either way, it's right on target.

POSTSCRIPT: The Economist this week says infrastructure spending has been weak, but they're guilty of chart crimes. First, they squeezed their chart to make the downward trend look super steep. Second, they drew a line at the point the bill passed, but obviously spending isn't going to turn up instantly. You have to wait a few months for the money to flow.

They also use numbers I'm not familiar with. Mine are straightforward public construction numbers from the Census Bureau.

Tyler Cowen got me curious about something yesterday. Commenting on the Geert Wilders victory in the Netherlands, he says "much of the world is moving in a right-wing direction."

But is that true? Yes, we have the evidence of Italy and now the Netherlands this year. But we also have Poland, where the illiberal Law & Justice party was pummeled in October and will be replaced by a liberal coalition. We have Spain, where lefties remained in power in the October election. We have Slovakia, where social democratic parties dominated against the incumbent conservatives in September.

Last year, Jair Bolsonaro was turfed out in Brazil and replaced by a socialist. In France, Marine Le Pen improved her performance by a few points but was still handily defeated by the incumbent centrist. In Germany, Social Democrats beat the incumbent conservatives in 2021 and the hard-right AfD lost seats. In Britain, the Conservative Party is deeply unpopular and will almost certainly be crushed in the next election.

And of course, here in the US Donald Trump was tossed out in 2020 and Republicans did surprisingly badly in the 2022 midterms.

What I see here is a couple of things. First, immigration is a powerful force and has driven a rise in hard-right nationalism. This is one reason I think Democrats should take immigration restrictions more seriously. Second, the main thing going on is just good old thermostatic politics. Lefties won in Germany because a conservative coalition had governed for 15 years. Conservative are in trouble in the UK because they've been in office almost as long. Poland's authoritarians were kicked out after nearly a decade. Likewise, conservative victories in Italy and the Netherlands came after years of center-left and technocratic rule.

Still, this made me curious. Is Europe, if not the entire world, moving in a right-wing direction? That turned out to be surprisingly hard to answer. Here's the best I could come up with. First is a chart from V-Dem purporting to show the pattern of rhetoric from Europe's governing parties:

This has trended steadily upward for half a century. It fits the general notion of a right-wing shift, but not the specific notion of anything new happening recently.

Here is European public opinion:

This only goes through 2018, but nonetheless it shows a steady and large trend toward increasing liberalism on both social issues and immigration (!), and a smallish trend toward liberalism on economic issues since the mid-90s.

Neither of these directly addresses the actual policies of governing parties over time, or even whether conservative parties in general have been on the rise. But taken as a whole, I see little evidence for it. I think it's fair to say that hard-right nationalist parties have grown over the past couple of decades, but even that's been limited both in scope and size. It's there, but there seems to be something of a ceiling on its potential in most places.

The Wall Street Journal says real estate data shows that more people are returning to the office:

According to a September report by Redfin, about 10% of home sellers in the U.S. are looking to move because of return-to-work policies, indicating that after more than three years of remote-work policies dominating behavior in the housing market, the in-person, 9-to-5 lifestyle is picking up some steam. Average office attendance last week was 50.5% of the prepandemic level in February 2020 across 10 major U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, according to Kastle, which tracks security-badge swipes into the buildings they secure.

I'd like to believe this. I've thought for a long time that remote work would return to the old normal once COVID-19 was behind us. And it still might. These things often take longer to happen than you'd think.

That said, there's really no evidence of it yet. Average office attendance plummeted to around 20% when the pandemic hit, and then steadily rose to 50% by the end of 2022.

And then it stalled. For the past year it's been stuck at 50%. Likewise, in the Census Bureau's Pulse survey, at the height of the pandemic 36% of workers said they worked remotely at least part of the time. At the end of 2022 that was down to 26%. By November the number was.......28%.

This year just hasn't seen any change in remote work. It's plateaued at a significantly higher level than 2019. Maybe that will change whenever we next have a recession, but that's just speculation. To my surprise, it seems to be here to stay.

This is Charlie out front gazing at birds flying overhead. Sadly for him, they are just a dream. The crows around here are about as big as he is.

Arin Dube thinks he knows the answer to an ongoing issue:

I am tried of this debate because the answer is yes and we should stop debating it https://t.co/47B2nG6JOL

— Arin Dube (@arindube) November 24, 2023

In other words, the answer is yes to both questions. People are concerned about their actual conditions and social media is making it worse.

But that's wrong! The answer is no to both questions. The evidence is overwhelming that actual conditions are pretty good and that, generally speaking, people know it.

But— they are being overwhelmed by reports telling them how bad things are. And while it's fashionable to blame everything like this on social media these days, Facebook isn't at fault here. Fox News is, along with the rest of the conservative noise machine. You can't get through a day of Fox News without hearing at least a dozen times that Joe Biden has wrecked the economy and produced ruinous inflation.

Why does it take so long to hammer this into people's heads? We know people aren't very upset about their personal situations because we've asked them. And we know that Fox News and the rest of the gang are infinitely more influential than Twitter or TikTok, especially among anyone over the age of 20. Come on, folks.

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a hard-right school board filled with Moms for Liberty members was swept out of office in November. But at the last minute they decided in their final board meeting to show their appreciation for the school superintendent who had backed their agenda:

A Pennsylvania school board that banned books, Pride flags and transgender athletes slipped a last-minute item into their final meeting before leaving office, hastily awarding a $700,000 exit package to the superintendent who supported their agenda.

But wait! That's not all:

The package also includes a puzzling ban on any district investigations of his tenure and an agreement that he can keep his district-issued laptop as long as he wipes it of school records. U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage nixed that last provision on Friday when he ordered Lucabaugh, a defendant in middle school teacher Andrew Burgess’s retaliation suit against the district, to preserve documents that may become evidence in the case.

This sure seems like a huge red siren that says "Investigate me!" It's literally an order to destroy evidence. If I were a nearby US Attorney I'd be on the next train to Doylestown.