Month: June 2024

There's been a lot of chatter lately about stuff we got wrong during the COVID pandemic. Fair enough. Nearly everyone worldwide got some or all of the same things wrong, though, so I'm not super inclined to hate specifically on Dr. Fauci or the CDC or WHO about it. It was just a really hard problem that came at us at very high speed.

But there's one particular "mistake" that deserves a little more attention: masks. A lot of people seem to think that mask mandates were proven to be just a piece of pandemic theater, and it's true that cloth masks and medical masks turned out to be of minimal use against COVID. But that doesn't mean masks are useless. Just the opposite. Recent studies have shown that we actually needed to mask better by encouraging broad use of N95 masks. Even better would be a program that distributes and fits N95 respirators individually.

I don't personally like this. I tried N95 masks a couple of times late in the pandemic and found them annoying. Nonetheless, they're what works.

This is something we should prep for. Maybe in a future pandemic we can reduce the social distancing to three feet and keep the kids in school. Lessons learned. But we should also be prepared to wear those annoying N95 masks anytime we're indoors. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a lesson that's gotten much airtime.

A lot of people see Elon Musk's tweets, so you might have seen this one:

This is not from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the main professional group of pediatricians in the US with nearly 70,000 members. It's the American College of Pediatricians, a small, socially conservative advocacy group founded in 2002 to oppose adoption by gay couples. They have opposed gender affirming care for trans children for many years. There's nothing either new or noteworthy about their latest statement.

Are illegal immigrants taking away American jobs? Tim Carney says it doesn't show up in the unemployment rate, but Mickey Kaus suggests this might not be a reliable measure:

Let's look at this. The big surge in illegal immigration started in 2021, so let's see if people in their 60s have been retiring at a higher rate since then:

Nope. The number of folks in their 60s who are still working has gone up. And it's the same story for age 65-69.

How about zooming in on Carney's chart of unemployment for the native born?

It's currently at 3.8% and has been shrinking or flat the entire time. But unemployment numbers can miss people who have exited the labor force and given up. So let's look at the participation rate for natives:

It's up. Finally, here's a look at the number of people who are new claimants of Social Security each year. This is for retired workers only, not survivors or those on disability:

This one starts back in 2001 because you need to look at current retirements compared to the pre-pandemic trend. It's been below trend for the entire period of high border crossings.

It's easy to make up endless "But what if...." scenarios when the basic data doesn't support your preferences. Anyone can play. You guys do it to me all the time in comments.

Sometimes these scenarios legitimately need to be investigated. But most often they're nothing more than mud on the walls, hoping against hope that you can introduce enough confusion to get people on your side. But in this case, there's just no there there. All the available data suggests that native-born workers of all stripes are in strong demand and have jobs.

Of course, the last refuge of the mud-tosser is a hypothetical. Maybe if illegal immigration had stayed low these numbers would be even better. Sure, maybe. And it's unprovable one way or the other, so there's no way to argue the contrary. You win!

However, if you just want to know what the available evidence says, it says that the recent surge in border crossings hasn't had any noticeable effect on wages, employment, or retirement for the native born. There might be isolated effects in certain industries or regions, but if there are they must be small enough not to impact the overall picture.

None of this should surprise anyone. There's a good deal of evidence that illegal immigrants compete for a different set of jobs than native-born Americans. Migrants mostly take the crummy jobs that natives turn down because they can get better ones—by virtue of their fluent English and legal work status. The border crossers simply live and work in a whole different economy than those born here.

Another headline today:

Really? Naturally this got me curious, especially since I was pretty sure I knew the answer. Here are new vehicle sales:

From 2000 through the beginning of 2020, unit sales clock in at an annualized rate of 16.13 million. For the last 12 months sales have averaged 16.15 million. There's no decline.

As it happens, most of the article is just a bitch session among enthusiasts about how new cars can't hold a candle to old cars. The old ones had V-8s, stick shifts, knobs instead of touch screens, etc. etc.

Fine. Nothing wrong with bitching. But if you're going to say that unhappiness about new cars is widespread enough to cut into sales, you should check first to see if sales are actually down.

Atrios points me today to a piece in the American Prospect about Long COVID. I know several people with Long COVID and it's no fun. The author of the Prospect article, Maureen Tkacik, also has Long COVID, and it sounds like hers is especially acute.

But the focus of the piece is the incompetence of the medical research establishment and its unwillingness to take Long COVID seriously. The main target of Tkacik's anger is the NIH, which is funding lots of Long COVID research, including a study at New York University:

The NYU effort involved recruiting hundreds of patients who had tested positive for COVID-19, subjecting them to extensive batteries of tests every few months, and building a database to collect and analyze their findings—a fine idea in theory, I guess, but hardly an appropriate first order of business in the middle of a public-health crisis affecting roughly 17 million Americans that has likely removed at least a million from the workforce already.

Some of the smaller initiatives funded by the RECOVER program were even more clueless....

Why is this clueless? It sounds like exactly what you should do—one of the things you should do—when you're fighting a weird disease with shifting symptoms that you need to understand better.

Tkacik mentions that Long COVID has symptoms similar to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, so that's where the focus should be. Maybe so, but it's hardly a secret that Long COVID and CFS share similarities. That's widely known and accepted by researchers. But where does this get us? Here is Wikipedia's summary of the current state of our knowledge about CFS:

The cause or causes of the disease are unknown. ME/CFS often starts after an infection, such as mononucleosis. ME/CFS can run in families, but no genes that contribute to ME/CFS have been found. ME/CFS is associated with changes in the nervous and immune systems, as well as in energy production. Diagnosis is based on symptoms because no diagnostic test is available.

We don't know what causes it, we have no way of diagnosing it, and only some Long COVID patients have CFS symptoms anyway. What's more, CFS and Long COVID may be similar but it's also clear they aren't the same thing. As for the Epstein-Barr virus, which Tkacik also points to, we don't know what role it plays since everyone has it and only some people get Long COVID. What's more, there are no vaccines for Epstein-Barr and precious few treatments, so it wouldn't help much even if we did identify it as a likely suspect.

In the end, Tkacik quotes only two people. One is her own doctor, who suggests Long COVID might be "psychological." I don't blame her for being pissed off about that, but take a look at the NIH page on Long COVID. It mentions several possible physical causes of the disease with not even a veiled hint that it might be all in your head.

The second person she quotes is an anonymous researcher who says, among other things, that NIH is wasting its money on "voodoo stuff like CBT." But cognitive behavioral therapy isn't voodoo. It might not work out in this case, but it's genuinely effective sometimes—and it might turn out to be a useful therapy for some Long COVID sufferers while we're waiting for more effective cures. I have trouble taking anyone seriously who says stuff like this.

The Long COVID community is widely contemptuous of all the funding for observational studies that haven't yet produced a cure. That's understandable. It's intensely frustrating that medical research takes so long. But it does, and neither the NIH nor anyone else is refusing to take Long COVID seriously. There are currently nearly 10,000 clinical Long COVID trials in progress supported by billions of dollars in funding. Unfortunately, given the history of things like AIDS, CFS, Lyme disease, and so forth, we'll be lucky if we get good treatments any sooner than a decade or two. After all, if the answer were really simple and obvious, we'd have a cure already.

Here is Charlie in a little nest he's made on our unmade bed. Notice the lack of judgment: made, unmade, whatever. That's totally different from you lot, who are probably thinking, "Hmmm, only one side of that bed is unmade. I wonder whose side it could be?"

And sure, it's mine. But that's because Marian is always cold and sleeps under every blanket on the bed. I run hot, and frequently just push everything off. So in the morning all Marian has to do is roll out of bed and it looks fine. By contrast, I'd have to, um, pull all the blankets back over, which would take a minimum of ten or fifteen seconds that would come straight out of blogging time. And I can't do that to you.

This stuff cracks me up:

I have news for conservatives: There has never been anything more important to Disney than making money. Anyone who's grown up in the vicinity of Disneyland can confirm that for you.

It's worth remembering how this whole episode played out. All Disney did was publicly oppose Ron DeSantis's "Don't Say Gay" bill. That's it. Companies take positions like this all the time.

But that unexpectedly provoked DeSantis into declaring war. Disney had no choice but to fight back, and every single thing Disney did after that was purely in defense of protecting its profits.

It's telling that Abel ends his piece with an approving nod about the fact that DeSantis won his fight to prevent Disney from "speaking on matters it had little business, and even less ability, to discuss." That's a pretty explicit endorsement of state governors waging vicious battles of revenge against corporations that say things they don't like—things they have "little business" discussing in the first place. I thought conservatives were supposed to be opposed to statist crusades like that?

As regular readers know, the maternal mortality figures reported by the CDC are completely wrong. We know this because the CDC itself has acknowledged it. A careful check of the numbers several years ago revealed that, in fact, maternal mortality has been stable for decades.

It's scandalous that the CDC hasn't updated its methodology and instead continues to report incorrect numbers. But Noah Smith points out today that this might not be mere incompetence. He quotes Jerusalem Demsas writing in the Atlantic:

Christopher M. Zahn, the interim CEO of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, wrote a lengthy statement in response, arguing that “reducing the U.S. maternal mortality crisis to ‘overestimation’” is “irresponsible and minimizes the many lives lost and the families that have been deeply affected.” Why? Because it “would be an unfortunate setback to see all the hard work of health care professionals, policy makers, patient advocates, and other stakeholders be undermined.” Rather than pointing out any major methodological flaw in the paper, Zahn’s statement expresses the concern that it could undermine the…goal of improving maternal health.

In other words, we need to maintain an air of crisis—even if it's bogus—in order to keep attention focused on reducing maternal mortality.

Noah writes about this primarily from the perspective that scientists are misleading us in order to keep funding and attention high for the programs they work on. And that's true. But I think the broader effect is more insidious.

Why do so many people think that things in the US are far worse than they really are? A big part of the reason is that it's not just individual scientists who are manipulating data to protect their own fiefdoms. On the left, practically the entire think tank industry is dedicated to doomsaying in order to keep the public focused generally on the need for stronger social programs.

We need an eviction crisis to maintain focus on the homeless. We need a safety net crisis to maintain focus on the poor. We need an incarceration crisis to maintain focus on racism. We need a wage crisis to maintain focus on the working class. We need an education crisis to maintain focus on the children. We need a police shooting crisis to maintain focus on social justice. We need a jobs crisis among the young to maintain focus on Gen Z. We need a democracy crisis to maintain focus on Donald Trump. We need a tuition crisis to maintain focus on higher education. We need a lead crisis in Flint to maintain focus on Black people. We need a pandemic education crisis to maintain focus on in-person learning. We need a cyberbullying crisis to maintain focus on the ills of social media.

Never mind that there is no eviction crisis. Never mind that social spending has skyrocketed over the past few decades. Never mind that incarceration rates among all races have been falling for over a decade. Never mind that the debate over flat wages is way out of date. Household earnings have increased 0.6% a year for the past 20 years and 1.4% a year for the past decade.¹ Never mind that test data suggests American children are actually doing pretty well. Never mind that police shootings of unarmed suspects—of all races—have plummeted over the past decade. Never mind that Gen Z is doing fine, both on the employment front and elsewhere. Never mind that democracy in the US is in excellent shape, both before and after the Trump era. Never mind that university tuition hasn't actually risen more than a smidgen over the past several decades. Never mind that the kids in Flint are fine. Never mind that pandemic learning losses seem to have nothing to do with remote learning. Never mind that cyberbullying hasn't increased and social media has mostly positive influences on teens.

Needless to say, conservatives do the same thing: They cherry pick statistics to "prove" dubious points that are politically convenient. But generally speaking they use anecdotal outrage to keep their audience motivated. Lefties use an endless barrage of social crises.

What this means is that both sides are in a relentless battle to paint America as a hellscape. Is it any wonder, then, that so many people think America is a hellscape?

This is a particularly bad strategy for progressives. When people are frightened and scared, they tend to vote for conservatives. That's why scaring people is a core part of movement conservatism. Conversely, people tend to be more generous and open-minded when they feel good. In the long run, an endless cascade of crises isn't good for the progressive cause, and that's especially true when the crises aren't even real. At the very least, we need to focus on real crises—fentanyl, climate change, Black schoolchildren—and spend a lot less time on the fake ones.

¹Yes, this is adjusted for inflation.

There are two primary measures of employment in the US. The first is Total Nonfarm Payroll, and it was up 272,000 in May. The second is the Employment Level, and it was down 408,000.

These two metrics measure different things, but their growth rates generally move in tandem. Over the past couple of years, however, their growth trajectories have diverged considerably:

Back at the start of 2022, both measures showed growth rates of about 5% year-over-year. Since then they've declined, but nonfarm payroll is still growing about 2% per year. The employment level, by contrast, is close to 0%.

This difference has been especially stark over the past 12 months. Nonfarm payroll has continued chugging along at its usual rate, gaining 3 million jobs. The employment level, by contrast, has been completely flat, gaining almost no jobs:

So what's the employment situation really like right now? I'm not sure anyone knows for sure. But it's possible that it's a little less cheery than it seems.

Conservatives are playing all their greatest hits these days:

The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.

Sigh. This is the "impoundment" debate all over again. It's ridiculous. Both Congress and the Supreme Court banned impoundment 50 years ago,¹ and even before then it was used only for relatively minor cuts. Every president since Nixon has wanted the impoundment power back, and every Congress since Nixon has refused to grant it.

That's not going to change, and even Trump's pets on the Supreme Court are unlikely to restore the impoundment power in any broad way. The Constitution is simply too clear about budgeting power belonging to Congress.

Trump can blather all he wants, but he doesn't get to unilaterally slash programs approved by Congress and signed by.......himself. This is just red meat for the rubes.

¹In fact, July 12 marks the 50th anniversary of the Impoundment Control Act.