Month: February 2024

I was fiddling around yesterday and happened to notice something a little odd:

Average hours of work per week fell sharply in January. It's now lower than it's been since the Great Recession with the exception of a single month at the start of the pandemic.

But then, because of my musing about seasonal adjustments, I got curious about what the raw numbers looked like:

Average weekly hours were actually down to 33.7, but the seasonal adjustment raised it 0.4 hours to to 34.1. Sure enough, the average change from December to January has been -0.4 hours over the past ten years:

Since average hours worked routinely drops by 0.4 hours per week in January, that gets backed out to produce a "true" seasonally-adjusted look at things.

That was kind of boring, wasn't it? But I'm curious about why weekly hours fell so dramatically. Maybe it's just a one-month artifact and things will be back to normal in February. Or maybe it means employers really are cutting back on hours. Stay tuned.

A decade ago San Francisco banned 8th grade algebra in an attempt to improve math outcomes for students of color. The Wall Street Journal reports:

A study by Stanford University researchers released in March 2023 found that San Francisco’s policy largely failed in its equity goals, with the proportion of Black and Latino students enrolling in Advanced Placement math courses hardly moving.

Then there's this from later in the story:

In the late 1990s [California] became one of the first states to push an “algebra for all” approach that strongly encouraged eighth-grade algebra.... Achievement on a 10th-grade high school exit exam didn’t improve after a majority of California students took algebra in eighth grade. In some cases, the research showed achievement declines.

So requiring 8th-grade algebra had no effect, and banning 8th-grade algebra had no effect. It's almost as if different kids have different abilities no matter what.

Nah. Couldn't be.

I know it's a little pointless to keep highlighting the endless lunacy of Republicans these days, but, I mean, come on. Check this out:

Gov. Ron DeSantis has endorsed legislation pending in the Legislature that would make it a criminal misdemeanor to manufacture, sell, or distribute “cultivated meat,” defined as “any meat or food product produced from cultured animal cells.”

....DeSantis, during a news conference, suggested he sees the lab-grown meat industry as another attempt to control Americans, similar to what he sees as happening with renewable energy. “You need meat, okay? We’re going to have meat in Florida. Like, we’re not going to have fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.”

This isn't about making sure that lab meat is properly labeled. Nor is DeSantis saying only that the state won't buy lab meat for school lunches. No, he wants to ban it completely in the state of Florida even though it's made by private companies and he has no apparent health or safety issues with it. He just thinks it's too woke or something.

What is wrong with these people?

Here's a tweet today about the high cost of renting:

Solid data is very hard to come by,¹ but in 1950 a one-bedroom apartment in a mediocre neighborhood in New York City cost maybe $60 or so. An entry level urban job paid about $180 per month and a crummy blue-collar job paid less than that. So for young workers rent took up anywhere from a third to nearly half of their income.

This is better than it is today—average rent in New York is now about half of average entry level pay—but it's not "any kid could show up" better. If you were an unskilled high school grad who bounced into New York in 1950, you could maybe live alone at the Y or in a single-room cold water walkup on the Lower East Side. Otherwise you needed roommates. It wasn't that different from today.

And New York City is pretty much the worst case for rents. Things are better almost everywhere else in the country.

¹What is "average" rent? In which neighborhood? What kind of apartment? Does it include rent-controlled apartments? And what's an average "entry level" job? How much did they really pay? How do you account for the large rise in college-educated young workers? Reliable statistics just don't exist for this stuff.

Caitlan Flanagan has an odd piece in the Atlantic today asserting that American university professors are no longer interested in presenting both sides of controversial issues—and I use the word assert advisedly here. The piece is odd because she presents literally no evidence for her argument even though she's written a whole book on the subject.

What really struck me, though, is that Flanagan's essay turns on a lesson from her father, who would listen to her youthful harangues and then quietly ask her, "And what is the best argument of the other side?"

I had learned the style and the rhetorical turns of making a great case, but I didn’t know the first thing about fortifying it with facts, reason, logic—or the best argument of the side I was treating in such a cavalier way.

This is a very strange takeaway. My guess is that her father was asking her to at least consider the possibility that she was wrong. But she took away something different: she just needed to learn to argue better. This doesn't strike me as a great look from someone who's urging students to think for themselves more effectively.

But long as we're on the subject, I have a similar story. Like Flanagan, my father was a university professor, and when I was in the 8th grade I was assigned to write a report on the Taft-Hartley Act.

(Why? God only knows.)

So I found a book, read it, and began writing. But one night I was regaling my father with the greatness of Taft-Hartley and he pulled me up short. "Well, that's what the proponents say," he said.¹ It hadn't occurred to me that the book might be biased. It was a book! And anyway, Taft-Hartley was a law, and aren't laws good?

This might seem fairly obvious to us adults, but it's surprisingly common for us adults to ignore it anyway and believe whatever we hear. But my father's implicit advice has stuck with me since I was 14. To this day, practically the first thing I ask when I read something is, "Does this guy have an axe to grind?" Almost all of us do, after all, and it's dauntingly hard to figure this out if you're reading or listening to a skilled arguer. This is because only doltish propagandists outright lie. The good ones make their case by what they leave out, and unless you're an expert yourself it's all but impossible to know what you aren't being told.

So there you have it: good advice from two fathers. I'll close with another piece of good advice, this time from Flanagan herself:

You don’t have to delve into the arcana of the Third Reich to destroy anyone making a case for it. But these layups rarely present themselves in decent places. Most of the time, the subjects we talk about are—for all of their flattening by cable news and internet wormholes and all the rest of it—extremely complicated.

Yep. For any subject interesting enough to matter, both sides will have some good arguments. I mean, what are the odds that your side literally has a monopoly on good points? The world is just too complicated for that.

¹Needless to say, Dad was old enough to have been an adult when Taft-Hartley was passed in 1948. He was keenly aware that it had been very, very controversial.

Continuing our series of Nat Bullard's climate charts, here's one about carbon capture:

This surprised me. I didn't realize CCS had increased over the past few years, let alone by a lot.

(But the numbers are still pretty low in absolute terms. Operational capacity in 2023 was 50 million tons compared to global CO₂ output of about 40 billion tons. That's a tenth of a percent.)

Unlike solar and wind, however, the cost of CCS hasn't been decreasing. That makes its future growth a lot less rosy than it is for renewable energy.

The US lost 2.6 million jobs in January:

So how did that become an increase of 353,000 in the official figures? The answer is seasonal adjustments: we always lose millions of jobs after the holiday season, so the numbers are adjusted based on how many we lost vs. how many we expected to lose. This is no simple task, either. Here's a description of the software used to make the calculations:

X-13ARIMA-SEATS is a seasonal adjustment software program developed and maintained at the U.S. Census Bureau.... It offers improvements in diagnostics as well as an enhanced version of the Bank of Spain's SEATS software. The SEATS routines are the result of collaboration with the developers of the software (Agustin Maravall, Former Chief Economist of the Bank of Spain, now retired, and Gianluca Caporello).

Spain! The X-13 software was adopted during Donald Trump's presidency, and is yet another example of the Deep State undermining his goal of America First. Here are the alleged "improvements":

• additional regressors for modeling calendar effects in stock (inventory) time series
• built-in regressors for new outlier types, including seasonal outliers, quadratic ramps, and temporary level shifts
• the ability to designate groups of user-defined holiday regressors and generate model diagnostics for the different groups
• regression model-based F tests for stable seasonal and trading day regressors
• accessible HTML output generated directly by the software rather than by a separate utility.

Very suspicious. No wonder the jobs numbers have looked so good under Biden. You know that Spain is run by socialists, don't you?

The New York Times has a reputation for running silly trend stories, but I think the Wall Street Journal has them beat. They run an endless stream of trend stories backed up by virtually no evidence.

So naturally I was suspicious about their latest offering:

The Hottest New Bedtime for 20-Somethings Is 9 p.m.

This time, though, they did have some backup:

In 2022, those in their 20s reported getting an average of nine hours and 28 minutes of sleep, according to an analysis of American Time Use Survey data by RentCafe. That is an 8% increase from the eight hours and 47 minutes they said they slept in 2010. Those in their 30s and 40s saw smaller increases.

Bedtimes are also creeping earlier. An analysis of more than two million total Sleep Number smart-bed customers found that those between 18 and 34 went to bed at 10:06 p.m. on average in January, compared with 10:18 p.m. last January.

Hmmm. The Sleep Number thing is a little creepy, but OK. And I don't know why the Journal had to rely on a time use analysis by RentCafe. It's all public data. So here it is, straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Time Use Survey:

As you can see, sleep time for everyone has been going up, and it's been going up for at least the past two decades. There's nothing either new or age-dependent about this: it's happened to every single age group all the way up to 65+.

So once again we have a groundless trend story. It's not that the Journal's numbers are wrong, just that they're presented without the context that would let you know there's nothing new to report here.

POSTSCRIPT: One of the annoying things about stuff like this is that there is a story here. The story is that we're all sleeping about half an hour more than we used to. Why? But instead the Journal had to somehow squeeze out a trend piece about those wacky kids these days, regardless of whether it made any sense.

Here is Hilbert emerging from the orchid tree in our backyard. It's the end of the line for him, though. A few feet further and the wall ends and is replaced by a wrought iron fence that's too narrow for even a cat to walk on. For some reason, though, he rarely turns around and goes back. When he comes to the end, he jumps off and goes about his ground-level business.

California has a shiny new law:

As of January, California police officers are required to provide motorists and pedestrians with the reason for stopping them before asking any questions. Under Assembly Bill 2773, which was enacted in 2022 and took effect with the new year, officers are no longer allowed to begin such encounters by asking drivers the infamous question, “Do you know why I pulled you over?”

That's fine, though it seems a little deep in the weeds for the legislature to be involved. The theory is that this will reduce pretextual stops that have a history of being weaponized against Black drivers.

Maybe? But what I really want to know is why police officers do this in the first place. Are they hoping to trick you into confessing? According to a couple of random legal sites I came across, that's exactly it:

Napolitano Law: Officers have been trained to ask that question in the hopes that motorists will make statements admitting guilt or fault.

White Law: This classic traffic stop opening is a trick question that’s meant to catch drivers off guard before they have time to remember their fifth amendment rights. If people answer the question and suppose why officers pulled them over, their answers could be used against them in a court of law. For example, if someone were to say, “because I ran a red light,” the cop now has a stated confession from the accused. This kind of confession will not result in an automatic conviction, but it’s not good for the defendant’s case.

OK, fine. That doesn't seem to have much to do with pretextual stops, though. Still, if the new law puts a stop to the game playing, I'm all in favor. Just tell us why you pulled us over and then either write a ticket or let us go. Finis.