Month: February 2024

Yesterday I casually dismissed some common complaints of Millennials about their lot in life. You will be unsurprised that I got some pushback. So here's a rundown of the complaints I listed along with evidence that they're untrue.

I expect approximately zero Millennials to be convinced by this. But it's all true! Young people always have less money and crummier jobs than older folks, but compared to Boomers of the same age Millennials are doing just fine.

Here's the list.

They can't buy a house. Oh sure they can:

They don't make any money. We'd all like more money, but Millennials make more than any other generation at the same age.

They can't afford to live in New York City. Young people make up the same share of the population in New York as they ever have.

Boomers are hoarding all the wealth. This is a popular meme that's due solely to a viral chart that popularized some misleading figures by looking at total wealth per generation. But Boomers were a much bigger generation than Millennials, so you need to look at wealth on a per-capita basis. When you do, Millennials are right on trend.

They can't get good jobs. This is obviously a judgment call, but there's no evidence that the job satisfaction for Millennials is any different than it was for young Boomers.

They're drowning in student debt. There's some truth to this one, but it's routinely exaggerated by including loans for postgraduate education (business, law, doctorates). Undergrad student loan amounts have been steadily decreasing for over a decade. Only about a third of young people have student debt at all, and before the pandemic halted repayments the Fed estimated that the median loan repayment was about $2,600 per year.

They'll never be able to retire. The best projection tool we have says this isn't so. Compared to Boomers, Millennial income upon retirement will be a smaller percentage of the median wage but a larger amount in absolute terms.

They're the first generation that's worse off than their parents. Millennials have incomes 23% higher than boomers at the same age.

Today I learned that the moon is getting smaller:

The moon’s shrinking has been measurable, but small. It has contracted about 150 feet in diameter over the last few hundred million years.

Small indeed! That comes to about a quarter of a millimeter every 10,000 years. At that rate, by the time the sun turns into a red giant and destroys us all the moon will be 2,158.5 miles wide rather than 2,159 miles. How about that?

I happened to come across a short piece by Lydia Polgreen about the "Fast Cars" duet at the Grammys featuring Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs. In a throwaway sentence at the end she said this about Chapman:

She was a poet of the despair wrought by the cruel economic vision of the Reagan years. What might she have to say about the intervening decades of hurtling down that same track?

The Reagan era wasn't a great time for the working class or the poor. But why this casual acceptance of lefty doom mongering about the years since then? It's obviously never a great time to be poor, but the last couple of decades haven't been so bad. Incomes are up:

Social welfare spending has skyrocketed:

In the bottom quintile of earners, market income averages $22,000. After taxes and benefits, it's $46,000. Not bad. As a result of this, poverty has also declined:

And we're generally more tolerant these days:

It's not all roses and sunshine these days for the poor and oppressed, but it's not the Reagan era either. Buck up.

I honestly can't tell anymore if border hawks object to the Senate immigration bill for real reasons or made-up political reasons. But for what it's worth, here are the main objections from NumbersUSA:

1. Codifies catch&release
2. Codifies admin. rule allowing asylum officers not judges to grant asylum
3. Instant work permits to asylum seekers
4. Fails to end abuse of humanitarian parole or UAC loopholes
5. Adds 50,000 green cards/year for 5 years
6. Work authorization for adult children of H-1Bs
7. Adds "border emergency authority" w/out real enforcement teeth, only activated until 5,000 illegal southwest border entries per day

For what it's worth, here's my perspective:

1. Catch & release is a function of not having enough detention space for everyone who's caught crossing the border. Trump did it too. But the Senate bill allocates more than $3 billion to increase detention capacity and another chunk of money to increase the number of asylum judges. Together, these provisions will reduce the backlog of asylum seekers and provide more detention space. Nothing can guarantee the end of catch & release, but unless I'm missing something the Senate bill would go a long way toward reining it in.
2. The point of giving asylum officers emergency authority to decide asylum claims is to reduce the number of asylum seekers waiting for a court date. Sure, in theory, this could lead to asylum officers letting everyone in, but there's not a person on the planet who thinks this is what will actually happen.
3. "Instant" work permits are indeed one of the few prices that hawks have to pay in this bill. But it's designed to keep illegal immigrants from clogging up shelters because they can't find jobs while they wait for court dates.
4. The additional green cards are for legal, skilled immigrants. Is that really a problem?
5. Yes, children of skilled immigrants would also be allowed to work. This is genuinely trivial.
6. Border emergency authority starts at 5,000 encounters per day, and it's enforced the same way any other law is enforced. It might not be as much as hawks would like, but surely it's better than no emergency authority at all?

Republicans are missing a bet. Right now illegal immigration is high because the job market is tight, but that won't last forever. When jobs get harder to find, illegal immigration will decrease and the "crisis" will be over. There will no longer be a lot of public and media panic over it, and the chances of passing tough immigration reforms will be gone. This is the lesson of Brexit: strike while the immigration iron is hot. You don't have forever.

This is a glass thingamajig at the Istanbul Home shop on the Balboa peninsula. I don't think it has any function. The shop is full of these things, and they seem to be purely decorative.

Yesterday Dean Baker asked a good question: why do media outlets keep telling us that it's all but impossible for young Millennials to own a home?

It seems that cost-cutting or other measures prevent reporters at CNN and the New York Times from getting the data that the Census Bureau publishes quarterly on homeownership rates among young people. They keep telling their audiences that young people will never be able to own a home. This is in spite of the fact that homeownership rates among young people are higher today than in 2019 when they did not constantly run stories about young people not being able to own a home.

Dean included a chart that goes back to 2018 for age 35 and under, but I wanted to go back further and zoom in on 20-somethings. Here it is:

As Dean points out, it's hard for young people to afford a home. But it always has been. Even with high mortgage rates right now, there's really nothing new going on. The homeownership rate is higher now than it was in 1982.

As for why we hear the opposite so often, I think that's easy: it's just a part of the endless narrative about poor, downtrodden Millennials. They don't make any money. They can't afford to live in New York City. Boomers are hoarding all the wealth. They can't get good jobs. They're drowning in student debt. They'll never be able to retire. They're the first generation that's worse off than their parents.

Literally none of this is true. Millennials have problems, just like any generation. Some things are better for them and some things are worse. In the case of homeownership, Millennials suffered a bit during the housing bust, but Boomers suffered a good deal more during the Volcker recession:

Endless whining aside, it wasn't until 2022 that housing costs actually increased from their level in 1980. And this is temporary. When rates finally go back down, so will mortgage payments.

I suppose the Senate immigration bill doesn't really matter since Republicans have made it clear they plan to sink it. But there's still the theoretical question of whether Democrats ought to support it. That is, not as a compromise just to get Ukraine aid, but on its own merits. Is the border security part of the bill good on its own?

I confess I've lost my political bearings on this in recent years. Obviously Democrats tend to be softer on border security than Republicans. We generally don't think immigrants—legal or otherwise—are a threat. We don't think it makes sense to even think about deporting kids who grew up here. And regardless of anything else, we don't want illegal immigrants treated cruelly: kids held in detention, families broken up, etc.

But that said, what's the objection to tighter border security? Every modern country has borders and immigration barriers, and there's nothing special about the United States in that regard. Why shouldn't we protect our borders?

I understand not caring very much about the border. That describes me. I just don't think it matters all that much how many migrants we let in. At the same time, I don't deliberately want a porous border either.

Roughly speaking, the Senate immigration bill does two big things. First, it makes it easier to deport illegal immigrants. That seems unobjectionable. Second, it speeds up asylum decisions. This is a good thing no matter which side you're on. If you qualify for asylum, it's best not to keep you waiting ten years to find out. If you don't, it's best not to wait ten years to deport you.

So speaking for myself, the border provisions of the Senate bill mostly seem positive. They would tighten up border security moderately; speed up asylum hearings; provide counsel at immigration courts; and do nothing to make our treatment of immigrants more inhumane. No mass deportations. No ICE raids. No razor wire.

So yeah, I'd vote for it. Add in the Ukraine aid and the Gaza humanitarian aid, and it's even better. The Israel aid is a negative at this point, since I can no longer see a good case for actively supporting Netanyahu's brutality, but it's not enough to kill the bill—especially since, realistically, the Israel aid is probably going to pass Congress one way or another.

It might be pie in the sky as long as Mike Johnson refuses to bring up the bill in the House, but given a chance I'd say it's worth voting for.

Over at National Review they're still arguing about whether Democrats will "switch out Biden." Their consensus: probably not.

It's insane that people are still talking about this. "Democrats" don't have any way to force Biden to drop out any more than "Republicans" can force Trump to drop out. Biden can't possibly make it any clearer that he's running, and at this point it's up to voters. End of story.

And when was the last time an incumbent president was pressured to drop out anyway? There's LBJ, and that was more than 50 years ago.

It's Biden vs. Trump. That's it. There's really no point in navel gazing about anything else.

The text of the bipartisan border security bill has been released. Here's the money part:

• $20 billion for border security
• $60 billion for Ukraine
• $14 billion for Israel
• $10 billion for humanitarian aid to Gaza
• $5 billion for Taiwan

Here's my best quick take on the specific border provisions of the bill

• $3.2 billion to expand the capacity of detention centers.
• $2.5 billion for increased deportation flights.
• $400 million for additional asylum judges. This is an increase of a little more than a third.¹
• More money for the Border Patrol.
• Adds limited new restrictions on the use of parole at the border.
• Speeds up asylum hearings with the goal of completing them in six months for individuals and three months for families.
• "Shuts down" the border if crossings exceed 5,000 per day.² What this means: Those who cross the border illegally are either immediately deported or, for asylum seekers, given a summary credible fear examination that can't be appealed in court. However, asylum seekers would still be allowed to make normal legal appointments at ports of entry.
• Raises the credible fear standard to make it harder to seek asylum.
• Provides work permits for asylum seekers who are released into the country while awaiting court dates. This is designed to prevent asylum seekers from becoming charges on the welfare system.
• Increases the level of skilled legal immigration.
• No codification of DREAM.
• No path to citizenship.³

Even if this bill doesn't provide everything that immigration hawks want, it's hard to see why they'd shoot it down. It gives them a lot of what they want and requires only a few minuscule things in return (work permits, legal immigration increases). Hell, it even includes half a billion dollars for the border wall. Politics aside, it's practically a complete surrender by lefties.

¹This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation. The FY23/24 budgets for EOIR amounted to $860 million, of which $400 million was for personnel costs. The border bill provides an additional $404 million for "judge teams" through September 2026. That's about $160 million per year, a 40% increase. The bill also allocates $36 million to EOIR for legal counsel for asylum seekers.

²This has been the case for the entire past year. In December, border encounters averaged 10,000 per day.

³There's an exception that provides a path to permanent residency for Afghan immigrants who entered the country after July 2021. Most of these are people who worked with the US during our occupation of Afghanistan.

Here's the last of my charts from Nat Bullard's climate deck. But first, here's a look at the overall venture capital market:

After peaking in late 2021, the VC market has returned to its normal pre-pandemic levels. But climate tech is taking a bigger and bigger share of that:

The total amount of VC funding for climate tech was around $25 billion in 2023. That's nowhere near enough,¹ but at least it's going up.

¹My rough guess is that total climate tech spending (VC plus everything else) needs to be in the ballbark of half a trillion dollars per year. We're probably spending around a quarter of that right now.