Month: January 2024

Rick Hasen echoes an opinion today that I've shared for a very long time:

Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote.... As we enter yet another fraught election season, it’s easy to miss that many of the problems we have with voting and elections in the United States can be traced to this fundamental constitutional defect. Our problems are only going to get worse until we get constitutional change.

Without meaning to disparage other important rights, I've long believed that the three great pillars of democracy are freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, and the right to vote. Of those, the right to vote is not only missing in the US, it's actively opposed in a number of ways. The biggest is probably the common denial of voting rights to prisoners and ex-felons, but it's not the only one. In most places, you also can't vote unless you're registered, a significant and wholly unnecessary hurdle. Why not just let anyone vote who walks up on Election Day? Then there are the numerous photo ID laws set up recently that deny voting rights to anyone without the particular type of ID favored by the party in power.

The historical reasons for voting restrictions are obvious, but the Supreme Court upheld the principle of one-person-one-vote more than 50 years ago. I'm surprised that it's never gotten around to enforcing the obvious corollary to that: Proportional representation can only truly follow the one-person-one-vote principle if everyone has an equal right to vote. Denying or denigrating that right for any group makes a mockery of the principle.

Hasen advocates a constitutional amendment that would force the Supreme Court's hand. It would, he says, "have to be written clearly enough that it would be hard for the Supreme Court to ignore its commands." How about this?

The right to vote in any election shall not be abridged for any citizen over the age of 18.

That language has sufficed for freedom of speech for over 200 years, so why wouldn't it work here?

Finally, for what it's worth, here's the actual state of the economy in the final quarter of 2023 compared to 2022. I feel like I should hardly need to say this, but everything that should be adjusted for inflation has been.

• Real GDP growth: 4.9%
• Unemployment rate: 3.7%
• Inflation (CPI): 3.2%
  
• Inflation (CPI change from previous quarter): 2.8%
• Stock market (S&P 500): up 12.3%
• Consumer spending: up 2.3%
• New construction: up 8.0%
• Blue-collar hourly wages: up 1.1%
• All hourly wages: up 0.8%
• Productivity: up 2.4%
• Housing starts: up 3.4%

Home sales are down compared to last year and manufacturing orders are slightly down. Those are literally the only major economic indicators that were even slightly negative at the end of 2023.

NOTE: There are a few economic indicators that still aren't available for December. For those, I used the Oct-Nov levels compared to last year.

As long as we're at it, here's what else Republicans think about the economy these days:

• 58% think the overall economy is poor (vs. 14% for Democrats)
• 62% think the economy is getting worse (vs. 22% for Democrats)
• 53% say they are worse off than last year (vs. 18% for Democrats)
• 50% say they've heard mostly negative news about the economy (vs. 23% for Democrats)
• 48% think the economy is shrinking (vs. 16% for Democrats)
• 51% think we are currently in a recession (vs. 28% for Democrats)

On a personal level things are quite different:

• 7% say they are personally unemployed, almost identical to Democrats
• 6% are unhappy with their jobs, almost identical to Democrats
• 8% are "very worried" about losing their job, a little less than Democrats
• 22% say they might have trouble paying bills this month, a little more than Democrats

As usual, what we see in general is that in terms of their personal life, Republicans report roughly the same economic condition as Democrats. But when they're asked about the overall economy, they're far more downbeat. The media might be generally too pessimistic about the economy, but Fox News and its pals are obviously in a class by themselves.

I was fooling around with the latest YouGov/Economist poll and marveling anew at how bad Republicans think the economy is. But the most spectacular finding is surely this:

68% of Republicans think unemployment is a serious problem in the US.

The unemployment rate last month was 3.7%. It's been under 4% for 24 straight months. The unemployment rate in 2023 was the lowest in the past half century:

Now, this is average unemployment. Maybe you think there are individual places where unemployment is high, and the survey is picking up those folks. After all, the unemployment rate in Merced is 9%! But that's not it. In the entire country, only 2.3% of all metro areas have unemployment rates over 7%—almost all of them small farming regions in California.

Nor is it anything else. Unemployment is at historic lows for white people, Black people, and Hispanic people. For men and for women. For the young and the old. By virtually any measure, unemployment is historically low for everyone and has been for the past two years.

And here's the kicker: 54% of Democrats also think unemployment is a serious problem. That's not quite as lopsided as it is for Republicans, but it's still insane. Fox News may be the leader in pushing bad economic news on its audience, but they obviously aren't the only ones.

Unemployment fell to 3.6% in March of 2022 and has stayed within a tenth of a point of that ever since. The press has had 22 months to let people know this, but to this day the vast majority still think people are struggling to find work. What in the name of God is going on?

A boy and his pail at the beach.

How are our young people doing these days. Are they still stuck in low-paying jobs that require side hustles to make ends meet? Let's take a look.

For the entire past decade, the wages of young people have been going up, the ratio of part-time workers has been steadily decreasing, and the number with multiple jobs has been basically steady aside from the pandemic years.

Now, on the multiple jobs front, yes, it's possible that some young folks have really minuscule side hustles that don't get counted in the official statistics. But this isn't IRS data. It's survey data. The Census Bureau just calls up people and asks (among other things) if they have multiple jobs. There's no reason to think there's been any particular change in the way people respond to this question.

So: not only are young people doing fine, on average, but it appears that the whole gig economy meme was never true. Always beware of alleged trends that are based either on minimal data or no data at all.

"Global health security" is a measure of how well a country's public health system is prepared to deal with pandemics and infectious diseases generally. Can you guess which country is ranked #1?

The US is first by a comfortable margin. In the subcategory dedicated to having a strong public health sector to treat the sick, the US is also #1.

In one sense, this is of course good news. At the same time, it makes our generally mediocre response to COVID-19 under Donald Trump look even worse. We had the systems in place to do better than any country on the globe, but among the countries with the best health systems our excess death rate from COVID was the second worst.

California law says that drivers have to retake the DMV test when they turn 70. Fine. But the test questions have become crazy. They're completely divorced from knowledge of meaningful traffic laws and instead focus on weird trivia. As a result, we've had an endless stream of 70-year-olds wailing about how they've failed the test two, three, four, a dozen times and are beside themselves with frustration. But our DMV director has finally taken action:

As for test questions, more than 20 have been removed from the rotation. One asked what a driver should do when seeing a road sign that says “NEV USE ONLY” or “NEV ROUTE.” Readers had complained to me that they didn’t know what NEV means (Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, or golf cart), or couldn’t imagine the issue comes into play often enough to waste space on a license renewal test.

Another question, now removed, had asked: “What is another name for the hand-to-hand steering method?” I’m still not sure why anyone would know or care. Also shredded was a question asking the minimum manslaughter sentence for killing someone while evading police pursuit, and another that asked what the punishment is if you “evade a law enforcement officer performing their duties, but no bodily injury occurs.”

I've heard examples even worse than these. Whose idea was this?

And the really crazy thing is that there's a little-known option for avoiding the whole mess: an eLearning test that you can take at home. If you get a question wrong you just try again. It's essentially impossible to fail.

Progress!

Here is Peggy Noonan a couple of days ago:

Deep down a lot of hard-core Trump supporters, and many not so hard-core, think it’s all over. They love America truly and deeply but think the glue that held us together is gone. Religion and Main Street are shrinking into the past, and in the Rite Aid everything’s locked up. School shootings, mass shootings, nobody’s safe, men in the girls’ locker room, race obsessions, a national debt we’ll never control. China, Russia, nukes and cooked-up plagues. If they decide to do a mass cyberattack and take out our electricity for six months we’ll never get through it. Once we would.

I don't doubt that Noonan is right—about some Fox News neurotics, anyway. But she's old enough to know better than to write this and pretend it's something new, especially since she herself has written it numerous times. Here's a version from around 1970:

Respect for elders and the five-and-dime are shrinking into the past, and in the Rexall we sell condoms out in the open. Saturday night specials, gangs, nobody's safe, women demanding equal pay, Black Power, inflation over 6%. Vietnam, Russia, MAD, long hair and LSD. If the Arabs decide to embargo oil and take out our automobiles we'll never get through it. Once we would.

Come on, folks. There's always something. But here in the real world, GDP is up, employment is strong, wages are up, inflation is over, the abortion rate is down, teen pregnancy is down, crime is down, cigarette smoking is down, racism is down, teen bullying is down, the divorce rate is down, education is in good shape, homeownership is higher than in the 1980s, US universities are the best in the world, America owns the global software market, the US military is by far the world's strongest, and American workers are among the best paid in the world.

Even the bad stuff isn't generally as bad as people think it is. Illegal immigration is up, but that's probably temporary. Social media is scary, but evidence suggests it doesn't really have a negative effect. School shootings are also scary, but they cause fewer deaths than you probably think. Climate change is bad, but the surging rate of technological solutions is promising. Fentanyl is a scourge, but we've had drug scourges before and they eventually burn out. The national debt could be solved via some genuinely modest tax hikes. The Black-white education gap is the only big problem I can think of that literally has no silver lining at the moment.

We all live in the richest country in the richest era of history. We're mostly well paid, well fed, and get good medical care. We have so many entertainment options we barely know how to handle them. If we'd all just buck up and stop being scared of the monsters under our beds, maybe we'd finally figure out just how much of life there is to enjoy.

A father writes to "Ask Amy" today about his daughter, who deliberately smashed her cell phone in hopes of getting a new one. What should he do? Here is Amy's answer:

Unless you have purchased insurance, replacing this broken phone could be a very expensive proposition (insurance is also expensive, and there is a deductible to replace a broken or lost phone). I do believe that it is something of a safety issue for a teenager to have a phone these days, and because of that, she should have one.

....I think it's important that your daughter should ultimately pay for the replacement — or negotiate a partial payment with you and her mom. Experiencing the consequences of this incident should inspire her to be much more careful.

I am bursting with follow-up questions:

1. The incident happened at a friend's house. According to the letter writer, "I called the friend’s mom and she told me that both girls had deliberately broken their phones in order to get new ones." wtf? Was the friend's mom watching while the phones were smashed? Why didn't she proactively call up the parents to let them know what happened?
2. Insurance doesn't cover the deliberate destruction of a phone, does it?
3. Why is having a phone a safety issue "these days"?
4. This isn't a case of getting the daughter to be "much more careful." She wasn't careless. She deliberately destroyed the phone! She was trying to scam her parents and lied about it to their faces!
5. The letter writer says his wife just wants to get the daughter a new phone and be done with it. Seriously?
6. Why am I reading "Ask Amy"? I don't remember. For some reason I clicked on this last night.

As near as I can make out, everyone in this story is completely crackers. The daughter deliberately wrecked a phone. Friend's mom didn't bother letting Dad know what happened. Mom just wants to get the daughter a new phone. And Amy is totally out to lunch. Not one single person seems to think that the daughter ought to be punished in any way aside from (maybe) getting a crummy flip phone and (maybe) paying for part of it.

I am not a parent. I admit I might wuss out if this happened to me in real life. But my initial thought is that I'd ground the daughter for a good long time so she wouldn't need a phone for "safety reasons." Help me out here. Am I the asshole?