Month: January 2024

How did Christmas turn out for our nation's retailers? Sort of meh:

December retail sales were down a fraction of a percent from 2022 but still well above their pre-pandemic trend.

China's crude birth rate dropped again in 2023:

China's birth rate dropped from 6.77 per thousand in 2022 to 6.39 in 2023, a decline of 6%. China's net population declined for the first time in 2022 by about one million. In 2023 it declined by 3 million.

As you know, the maternal mortality rate has been increasing steadily in the US. Except, as Noah Smith informs us, it turns out it hasn't.

This is a bizarre story. In 2003 the standard US death certificate added a pregnancy checkbox. As more and more states adopted the new certificate, reports of maternal mortality went up. But it was all a mirage. In 2020 the CDC performed a detailed study and discovered that when they ignored the checkbox and looked solely at the underlying cause of death, nothing had changed:

Now here's the kicker. If you go to the CDC's main maternal mortality site, it's absolutely littered with stark warnings about this coding problem. In the FAQ it says this:

The [2018] MMR is more than double the rate reported before the checkbox was added, but a rigorous evaluation confirms that the increase in reported rates is almost entirely because of changes in reporting methods. After evaluating more comparable data, the rate has not significantly changed since 1999.

This is unequivocal: the old numbers are wrong and the new numbers are right. But they haven't done anything about it! Figures since 2018 have been released using the old method with only tiny changes. Last year the CDC reported that maternal mortality had exploded in 2021 to a rate of 33 per 100,000 but the report made no mention that this was almost certainly a completely bogus number.

Nobody has done the work to update the figures past 2018, so on an apples-to-apples basis we have no idea what the maternal mortality rate really is. The CDC is just merrily releasing alarming figures that are plainly wrong without providing any clue about how wrong they are. What the actual fuck is going on here?

POSTSCRIPT: Both the old and new methods do agree on one thing: MMR is way higher among Black women than anyone else. And we still don't know why.

The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have been attacking Western shipping in the Red Sea. Over at National Review, Charles Cooke says we need to teach them a lesson:

We’re trying to get on with our lives peacefully, and they’re interrupting it. And if the consequence of us dealing with it is that they escalate it, then we escalate it further until we blow them out of the water. It’s just very simple. This is statecraft 101.

Well, maybe not quite so simple. Most of the Houthi attacks are coming from ground-based drones and missiles, not ships on the sea. We're trying to destroy this capability, but it's virtually impossible to get it done solely via air attacks. To truly eliminate the threat you have to eliminate the Houthis, and that means boots on the ground.

And even that might not work. After all, Saudi Arabia has been fighting the Houthis for close to a decade with no apparent effect. The Houthis continued lobbing missiles into the Kingdom the entire time until a precarious truce was negotiated in 2022. The Saudis never even came close to destroying Houthi missile capability.

This is the problem with the default conservative position on war, which is basically "Hulk smash." It sounds good, but even the US has limits. We can't escalate every conflict infinitely, and the last couple of decades have surely taught us that even when we try it doesn't always work. Who runs Afghanistan these days after 20 years of American war and 2,400 American dead?

Maybe it's time for statecraft 102?

Yesterday Paul Krugman mentioned that over the past couple of years the economy has been especially strong for Black workers. That's true, and the effect has been pretty dramatic. Here's the labor force participation rate, a measure of how many people are working or actively looking for work:

For many years, the share of Black men in the labor force was a steady 5-6 points lower than white men. In the last couple of years of the Obama administration that gap narrowed to 4 points. Since 2021 it's narrowed again and is now less than 1.5 points. For the first time ever, nearly as many Black men are in the labor force as white men.

This hasn't changed wages much. Among those employed full time, Black men earn 20% less than white men. This is about the same as it was 20 years ago.

Black women are a different story: they've always been in the labor force at higher rates than white women. Their gap has widened recently, but not as much as men's has shrunk.

Today I have some good news, some bad news, some good news, and some bad news for you.

The good news is that we've reached agreement on a bill that would modestly raise the Child Tax Credit.

The bad news is that—of course—Republicans have only agreed to this if it's offset with yet another tax break for businesses.

The good news is that the tax break isn't really a bad one, so the whole package is pretty good.

Finally, the bad news is that no one thinks this can pass.

This is a rock formation in Colorado called Elephant's Feet. It's pretty obvious to see why, but there are only two of them. Are they the front feet or the back feet?

A perennial favorite of presidential campaigns is the "Rose Garden Strategy." But there are others. Harry Truman adopted a "Whistlestop Strategy" in his 1948 campaign. Richard Nixon was the first to pursue a "50 State Strategy" in 1960. During the COVID pandemic, Joe Biden pioneered the "Basement Strategy."

But this year brings something truly new. Donald Trump has promised to attend all of his trials in person because of the media attention they bring. For the first time ever, a presidential candidate is running on an "I Haven't Been Convicted Yet Strategy."

Strange times.

In the seminal Heller case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. However, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the right wasn't unlimited:

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.... Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.

See? Completely reasonable and nuanced. Jittery liberals never had anything to worry ab—

A federal judge in Florida on Friday ruled that a U.S. law that bars people from possessing firearms in post offices is unconstitutional, citing a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 2022 that expanded gun rights.

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump...said allowing the federal government to restrict visitors from bringing guns into government facilities as a condition of admittance would allow it to "abridge the right to bear arms by regulating it into practical non-existence."

That's from Reuters. The next step, I suppose, will be a ruling that there's no historical precedent for distinguishing handguns from rifles, and therefore no bar to showing up for work with an AR-15 slung over your shoulder. I mean, if you can't bring an assault rifle into a post office or court building, American freedoms are hanging by a mere thread, right?

The Supreme Court will be hearing a couple of cases soon that have the potential of undermining something called "Chevron deference." This does not mean we are supposed to pay special attention to Chevron Oil. It refers to a 1984 Supreme Court case that says courts should allow federal agencies to make any reasonable interpretation of a law if the law is ambiguous. The word reasonable is key here. Agencies aren't allowed to do literally anything they want. They are merely allowed to choose among competing reasonable interpretations based on their experience and expertise.

Getting rid of Chevron has been a white whale of the conservative movement for years. But even the Wall Street Journal editorial page can muster only tepid arguments for overturning it:

Chevron arose when judges were willy-nilly substituting their policy preferences for those of the elected branch. But the doctrine has no constitutional basis.... The late Justice Antonin Scalia supported Chevron after he joined the Court, but he later expressed misgivings as judges bowed to regulators even when they were stretching or rewriting the law.... Overturning Chevron is an important act of judicial housecleaning that would rein in the administrative state and encourage Congress to write clear laws.

The truth, of course, is that overturning Chevron wouldn't rein in the "administrative state." It would simply give more power to judges. Back in 1984 when judges were viewed as too liberal and Ronald Reagan was president, conservatives preferred the administrative state. Today, with a more conservative judiciary, they prefer taking their chances in court.

What's really behind this, of course, is not any real concern with federal agencies per se, or with Congress writing clearer laws. It's the long evolution of the conservative movement against expertise of all stripes. The original justification for Chevron was the simple and obvious observation that modern life is complicated, and in cases of ambiguity it was better to leave things to subject matter experts rather than judges with no relevant knowledge. That's still the case, but movement conservatism has turned so hard to the right that it simply doesn't want to bend to reality anymore. It wants what it wants, full stop. From climate change to environmental rules to labor law to reproductive rights, it knows perfectly well that it can get its way only by a wholesale denial of reality. Nerdy bureaucratic scientists will never go along with that, but judges might. So Chevron has to go.