Month: February 2024

Fani Willis has fessed up to allegations made by Mike Roman, one of the 19 defendants in the Georgia election fraud case:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) admitted she had a personal relationship with an outside prosecutor she appointed to manage the election interference case against former president Donald Trump and his allies but denied claims that the relationship had tainted the proceedings.

....Ashleigh Merchant, Roman’s attorney, has said she plans to issue subpoenas for witnesses and documents to back up her client’s claims of misconduct. Merchant said in a lawsuit this week that she has subpoenaed Willis and Wade to testify, and she is expected to seek testimony from Wade’s current and former law partners and others associated with the district attorney’s office.

I'm curious to see how this goes in court. Willis's affair with Nathan Wade may have been unwise or even improper, but it mostly seems (a) trivial and (b) completely unrelated to the election fraud case against Roman, Donald Trump, and others. It's pretty obviously just an attempt to smear Willis and force her to recount embarrassing personal details on the witness stand. Roman has all but bragged about this.

As always, IANAL. But this sure seems like a case that ought to be tossed out on summary judgment for being vindictive and frivolous.

Here are a couple more samples from Nat Bullard's deck of climate-related charts. First up is EV production:

China has loads of cheap EVs, but tariffs keep them out of the US. That's obviously hurting the uptake of EVs in the US, but it's not the only thing. There's also charging infrastructure:

These are 2022 numbers, and presumably things are a little better now. Still, aside from Tesla chargers, the US has very little charging infrastructure compared to about 15,000 GWh of infrastructure in China. Much of this is due to the very slow rollout of the $7 billion federal charging network that was included as part of the bipartisan infrastructure act.

For the past eight months India has been holding a suspected spy pigeon in custody:

The pigeon’s ordeal began in May when it was captured near a port in Mumbai with two rings tied to its legs, carrying words that looked like Chinese. Police suspected it was involved in espionage and took it in, later sending it to Mumbai’s Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit Hospital for Animals.

A thorough investigation uncovered the truth:

Eventually, it turned out the pigeon was an open-water racing bird from Taiwan that had escaped and made its way to India.

The pigeon has been cleared of all charges and released. I wonder if it will fly back to Taiwan?

The American economy gained 353,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 263,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.7%.

This is a very nice jobs report. Employment remains strong and the unemployment level remains low. The labor force participation rate for prime age workers ticked up a bit and remains higher than its pre-pandemic record. My fears of an upcoming recession are still around, but the last couple of months have sure looked nice and strong.

Ezra Klein asks today, "Why haven't the Democrats completely cleaned the Republicans' clock?"

Actually it's Ruy Teixeira who asked that question, and it's one I share. I mean, Republicans have turned into complete loons. Democrats should have been able to build a huge and enduring lead over the past decade. Why haven't they?

Teixeira suggests it's because Democrats have lost blue-collar voters:

We have to get back to some of the underlying trends that have affected working class voters in the United States and how they’ve experienced their lives, and how their communities have evolved and the resentments they have about the various political parties and what they stand for.

....I tend to believe if Democrats could produce rising incomes and wages for most working-class voters for many, many years and transformed the political economy of the United States into something pretty different and perceived as something pretty different than what they’ve experienced in the last several decades, do I think they’d benefit and be able to dominate a Republican Party whose economic policies are far less salubrious? Yes. I do think that’s, in fact, possible.

That is possible. Here's a chart I've posted before, though it's been a while:

Over the last 30 years college educated workers have seen their earnings go up. Not a whole lot, but at least up. The same is true of women who only completed high school.

But men with only a high school diploma have seen their incomes slide and then slide some more. There were brief exceptions during the expansions of the late '90s and aughts, but they didn't last. Right now, men with no college earn 6% less than they did 30 years ago. The college kids, who were already making more, have opened up ever bigger leads over time.

In other words, it's really true that blue-collar men in particular have an economic beef they probably don't think Democrats take seriously. On the other hand, this started as far back as Nixon, long before neoliberals took over the party. It's also true that by far the worst decade for blue-collar men was the Reagan era and the best decade was the Clinton era. But they loved Reagan and didn't care much for Clinton. Economics just doesn't seem like it can explain much.

Every time this comes up, I refresh myself on the evidence and end up coming back to the same thing: the two drivers of Democratic losses are race and culture. Race is obvious: the white South has switched pretty much completely from Democratic to Republican and it was quite obviously due to the Civil Rights Act and other racial turnabouts of the '60s and beyond. Today, the Republican Party is almost entirely white.¹

Culture is also fairly obvious because we've talked it to death over the past couple of decades. Working class discontent with liberals has been driven by an underlying long-term trend starting in the counterculture '60s and then supercharged by Fox News starting in the late '90s. Fox may tell their audience that Democrats are bad for the economy, but they spend ten times as much time obsessing over the latest cultural outrage from liberals. You could pretty much write a political history of the right just by listing the most common subjects covered by Fox News over the years since 2001. It's gone from Muslims to voter fraud to the tea party to Critical Race Theory to whatever they decide to focus on this year.

Research suggests that Fox News generates about 3% more votes for Republicans than they'd otherwise get. In a 50-50 electorate, that's a lot. And it doesn't help that Democrats make themselves so easy to attack.  From "Defund the Police" to extreme softness on the border to defending trans girls competing in high school sports, liberals have been pushing the boundaries of social conventions pretty hard. That scares ordinary people and costs votes.

There's probably not a lot we can do about race. Some people are racists and that's that. We just have to fight them. But we could probably tone down the cultural leftism and adopt moderately more populist economic policies. It wouldn't take a lot. But it might make enough of a difference to sink the Republicans for the coming decade.

¹In Congress, there are currently four Black Republican House members out of 222 and one Black senator out of 49. That's less than 2%.

Dave Roberts recommends that I take a look at Nat Bullard's deck of climate-related charts, and naturally I did. Here's a chart that should be familiar:

The price of solar has plummeted over the past decade. But as conservatives are constantly reminding us, the sun doesn't always shine. Then what?

The price of battery storage has plummeted too. All utility-scale solar plants now include battery storage so they can supply power 24 hours a day, and they can do this because the price of storage is a quarter what it was a decade ago.

Since 2000, the share of the population with a BA or higher has gone up 39%. But the share of the labor force with a BA or more has gone up 45%.

At the end of last year, 72% of those with college degrees were in the labor force. Only 57% of those with only high school diplomas were in the labor force.

The Rainbow Inn in Pierre Part, Louisiana, a little north of Morgan City.

Earlier this morning I wrote about the jump in US labor productivity at the start of the pandemic. The odd thing wasn't the jump itself, but the fact that the new higher level was permanent.

I've finally tracked down quarterly figures for hours worked, so here is labor productivity since the end of the Great Recession:

The "new normal" isn't quite as dramatic as I thought it was. Productivity did stagnate for a couple of years after the jump in 2020 before it started to climb again. Nonetheless, productivity really does seem to be at a permanently higher level. It's currently about 4% higher than the pre-pandemic trendline.

POSTSCRIPT: On the other hand, productivity growth was weak during the aughts, so maybe 2020 mostly represented catch-up growth? If you look at the trend in productivity for the past few decades, the jump in 2020 only got us back to the long-term trendline. So . . .

Via Tyler Cowen, this is from the abstract of a recent paper that examines mortgage loans:

Interestingly, we also find that same-sex couples default significantly more (53.9%) than similar different-sex couples.

But that's not quite right. Here's what the paper itself says:

Male-male loan originations are associated with 2.053 percentage point higher delinquency rate relative to similar male-female applications. Given that the mean male-female delinquency rate is 3.81%, this result suggests that male-male  applications are 53.9% more likely to be 90-day delinquent relative to similar male-female applications.... The coefficient for female-female is statistically significant at 1% level and is about a third of the male-male coefficient.

Lesbian couples are only about 0.78 percentage points more likely to default than straight couples. This difference manifests in loan rejection rates, which are considerably higher for gay men than for gay women (and both are higher than rejection rates for straight couples).

Why? The authors say only that "we are in the process of understanding
the mechanisms that drive these results." If the data were available (I suspect it's not) I'd be curious about the delinquency rate for married couples vs. partners. This is just a guess, but I imagine that married couples are less likely to default regardless of sexual orientation.¹

¹My reasoning is that partners can, if circumstances permit, just say fuck it, split up, and hand over the keys. Married couples have to get divorced, which makes their home part of a legal process.