Month: August 2024

Just in case you care, today is the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It happened at 8:15 am on August 6 in Hiroshima, which is 7:15 pm on August 5 in Washington DC.

It is nearly conventional wisdom these days, certainly on the left, to say that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary and constituted a war crime. I still disagree. It's true there were multiple reasons Japan surrendered when it did, but there's not much question that the bombs were a big part of it. Without that, the war almost certainly would have ground along for another year and produced hundreds of thousands more deaths. Things are different now, but if I had been president in 1945 I would have done the same thing Truman did. This was not a war of choice. We were the ones attacked, and ending things with minimum loss of life was the right thing to do.

Paul Krugman says today that the economy is looking "pre-recessionary." He blames the Fed:

What’s especially galling about the current situation is that we may be about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As of right now, America has basically achieved what many economists had considered impossible: a soft landing, in which we managed to get inflation way down without high unemployment. But we are increasingly at risk of experiencing a lot of unnecessary pain simply because the pilot waited too long to pull up the plane’s nose.

I've got a couple of things to say about this. The first is that the soft landing talk was always ridiculous. When you're on the way to a hard landing, there's always a point where the landing looks soft if only things just stop right there. But of course there's no way to know. Usually they don't.

The second is that no one should be surprised by what's happening. As you all know, I've been predicting a probable recession for a long time, and you might think I've changed my mind on that since I haven't mentioned it lately. Not at all. It's always been the case that recessions start 1-2 years after the Fed hikes interest rates, and we're admittedly at the far edge of that. But it's hardly a firm rule. Several recessions have started 2½-3 years after the Fed started raising rates.

I haven't mentioned this very much recently because I didn't want to come off as Chicken Little. But nothing has changed. The Fed never needed to raise rates more than modestly since our recent bout of inflation was caused primarily by COVID, not a frothy market. (Surely nobody contests this anymore?) But they did, and the result is that they hit the brakes on an economy that was healthy but not overheated. There's only one way for that to end: in recession.

If we're still not in recession a year from now, I'll concede defeat. Miraculously, the Fed will have raised rates more than 4% and engaged in considerable quantitative tightening—and produced nothing. If that happens, though, a whole bunch of intro macroeconomics textbooks will need an emergency update, because this has literally never happened before. I wouldn't count on it happening this time either.

Google lost the first round of its antitrust suit today. As you may recall, there are two big things you have to prove in order to find a company guilty of antitrust violations. The first is that the company is a monopoly, and Judge Amit Mehta made quick work of that:

Plaintiffs easily have demonstrated that Google possesses a dominant market share. Measured by query volume, Google enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices. This overwhelms Bing's share of 5.5% on all queries and 1.3 % on mobile, as well as Yahoo's and DDG's shares, which are under 3% regardless of device type. Google does not contest these figures.

Mehta also noted evidence that Google's own research shows that it could degrade quality and it still wouldn't suffer any loss of market share. In short, there's no question that Google holds a monopoly both in search and in search ads, where they have an 88% market share.

But that's not enough. It isn't illegal to be monopoly. It's only illegal if you abuse monopoly power—for example, by making it impossible for new competitors to enter the market. Mehta found a number of ways that Google had abused its power, most noticeably by paying billions of dollars to browser companies in return for making Google their default search engine:

Google controls the most efficient and effective channels of distribution for GSEs [general search engines]. It is the exclusive preloaded GSE on all Apple and Android mobile devices, all Apple desktop devices, and most third-party browsers (Edge and DDG are the exceptions). Rivals cannot presently access these channels of distribution without convincing Google's partners to break existing agreements, all of which are binding for a term of years.... It is also a "realit[y] of control” that Google is the sole default on Chrome.

Under current antitrust doctrine, Google could argue that even if all this was true, it didn't matter as long as customers got a good deal out of it. But if Google is really that great, why do they have to spend billions to essentially force people to use it?

As a matter of fact and law, then, Mehta concluded the following about Google's control of the search market:

• The Exclusive Agreements Cause Anticompetitive Effects in the General Search Services Market
• The Exclusive Agreements Foreclose a Substantial Share of the Market
• The Exclusive Agreements Have Deprived Rivals of Scale
• The Exclusive Agreements Do Not Result in Procompetitive Benefits

And the following about its control of the search advertising market:

• The Exclusive Agreements Foreclose a Substantial Share of the Market
• The Exclusive Agreements Allow Google to Profitably Charge Supracompetitive Prices for Text Advertisements
• The Exclusive Agreements Have Allowed Google to Degrade the Quality of its Text Advertisements
• The Exclusive Agreements Have Capped Rivals' Advertising Revenue

In other words: guilty, guilty, guilty. The judge was also unamused by Google's failure to preserve chat messages:

The court is taken aback by the lengths to which Google goes to avoid creating a paper trail for regulators and litigants. It is no wonder then that this case has lacked the kind of nakedly anticompetitive communications seen in Microsoft and other Section 2 cases.... Google clearly took to heart the lessons from these cases. It trained its employees, rather effectively, not to create "bad" evidence.

Mehta declined to sanction Google for this behavior, but only because it wasn't worth it. They lost the case easily with or without the evidence of internal communications.

It's notable that this case wasn't brought by Joe Biden's administration. Bill Barr and an all-star cast of red states filed the antitrust suit in late 2020, most likely because Trump and other conservatives were convinced Google was censoring them and taking down their ads. If this had ended up being the basis for the suit, it most likely would have lost. Luckily, Joe Biden took over a few months later, and his Justice Department filed a normal, meat-and-potatoes case rather than the bizarre cry for retribution that Trump's people probably would have pursued.

In any case, this isn't nearly over. Next the judge has to announce what price Google will pay, and then Google will surely appeal. Give it a few more years.

Behold the Lagoon Nebula, M8, one of the biggest and brightest nebulas in the Northern Hemisphere. It is, unfortunately, only visible for a few hours each night in July and August, and it's low in the sky. However, I trekked out even farther into the desert than usual this weekend and got some very dark skies, so the final picture turned out pretty well.

The Lagoon is an emission nebula, which means there's a star behind it that illuminates the gas cloud. You can see the star at the lower center. This meant that I could break out my narrowband filter, which helped a lot to bring out the details. I was also pleased to see that the filter didn't cause any problems with streaking this time.

Wall Street is panicking over the stock market. Here's what it looks like at the moment I'm writing this:

This is not yet even in "correction" territory, let alone a full-blown collapse. But a headline in the New York Times says traders are so panicked they think the Fed might hold an emergency meeting to cut rates.

I'd be fine with that, of course, though not because of modest losses on the stock market. I just think the Fed has kept rates far too high for far too long, so I'd be happy for any sign that they were taking the possibility of a downturn seriously. At this point, I really don't think inflation is what we need to be worrying about over the next year.

Is California a high-tax state compared to red states like Texas and Florida? It depends! Here's what things look like if you're rich:

California is a ball-buster, with the second highest tax rates in the country. Texas and Florida are way down the list.

But what if you're working class? Let's take a look:

California is about average, with a tax rate lower than either Texas or Florida. Texas has the ninth highest tax rate in the country if you're working class.

This all comes from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which earlier this year published its latest data on tax rates by state. Overall, California is indeed a high-tax-high-service state, but the big difference is that Texas and Florida tax grocery store clerks and janitors way more than they tax millionaires. California taxes them less.

It's sort of fascinating to watch The Big Lie unfold in real time. In this case I'm talking about Donald Trump's assertion that Kamala Harris used to identify as Indian and then switched to being Black when it became politically expedient.

Usually there's some small kernel of truth to these kinds of attacks, but this time there isn't even that. It's simply invented out of whole cloth. Harris has always IDed as biracial and nothing about that has ever changed.

Despite this, conservatives have eagerly taken up the charge, hoping to repeat it often enough that it sinks in. But why? What's the point?

It's not just because they're afraid to disagree with Trump. Nor is it because Trump's accusation was just a weird flub. It was planned in advance with malice aforethought and it was very deliberately done in front of a Black audience. That's because it was intended to appeal to a longtime obsession of the right: namely that identity politics and accusations of "systemic racism" are just a con job by liberals. Kamala Harris, Trump is implying, is a perfect case. She's really Indian-American but then cynically adopted Blackness so that she could complain about "racist attacks" from conservatives.

This is why a seemingly trivial falsehood is more powerful than it appears. It confirms the widespread view in MAGA world that Harris is just another race hustler out to weaponize her dark skin against whites. In reality, it's white people who have suffered increasing discrimination in recent years, right?

A couple of days ago I posted a chart showing that Democrats were more likely to be childless than Republicans. I thought this was mainly due to religiosity, but I wasn't sure.

However, a friend emailed me a link to Ryan Burge's substack, called "Graphs About Religion." This is an admirably clear name, and it delivers what he promises. What he found is that religion has a lot to do with childlessness, but not everything. Here's one chart:

Even if you compare regular churchgoers, Democrats are still less likely to have children. But there's some interesting detail in a second chart:

Among atheists and high-income mainline Protestants, Republicans are more likely to have children even after you control for some standard demographics. However, among evangelicals and Catholics, there's no difference.

So in the end, it's true that Democrats are less likely to have children than Republicans. But this is entirely due to differences among atheists and mainline Protestants. What's more, with a few basic controls in place the gaps become fairly modest. Overall, the difference is probably on the order of 5% or so.

Just for the record, it really is true that sometime soon Kamala Harris is going to have to (a) put up a few policy positions on her website, and (b) start giving interviews to the national media.

It doesn't have to be tomorrow, but it ought to be pretty soon.

US conservatives are in a remarkable lather over the results of a women's boxing match between an Algerian and an Italian. The Algerian is Imane Khelif, a journeyman welterweight with a lifetime record of 38-9, who suddenly might or might not be 100% female depending on who you listen to. Here's what happened.

Khelif was born and raised as a girl. She is not trans. No one argues about this.

On March 24, 2023, after reaching the finals of the IBA World Championships in New Delhi, Khelif was disqualified along with another boxer. The next day, the president of the IBA, Umar Kremlev, said: “Based on the results of DNA tests...it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.” No testosterone testing was done at the time, but more recently Kremlev said "There will be no athletes with high levels of testosterone competing in women's boxing championships." Nobody knows quite what this means.

According to IBA board minutes, both boxers had also tested male at the previous year's championships in Istanbul: "[George] Yerolimpos confirmed that IBA has the results from two independent laboratories in two different countries at its disposal, both of which indicate that the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria to continue competing at the Championships."

Shortly afterward, Khelif filed an appeal but later dropped it. That made the IBA's decision legally binding. And since the International Olympic Committee has no gender rules of its own, deferring instead to each sport's governing body, that was that. Khelif wouldn't be able to compete at the Olympics.

Except for one thing: Thanks to a series of bribery and officiating scandals, the IOC broke off ties with the IBA in 2023. This meant that qualification for the Olympics defaulted to IOC rules, and there aren't any. They declared that both Khelif and the other boxer were eligible since they had no reason of their own to disqualify them.

So what's the deal? No one knows for sure. The IBA has been very cagey about what test they administered and has refused to clarify things. Nor have they explained why Khelif was allowed to compete in the first place if she had supposedly failed a test the year before.

Bottom line: The IBA says something is amiss, but it's too corrupt to be trusted and is refusing to provide any testing details. Plus Kremlev is sort of a known bigot who tweeted a couple of days ago that the Olympic Games are "outright sodomy." On the other hand, Khelif had the opportunity to appeal and decided not to. There are lots of possible reasons for this, but obviously one of them is that she knows she'd lose.

In any case, nobody seems to care very much about this except for Kremlev and Republicans in the US. The other boxers have just shrugged about it. It's not clear if we'll ever know more.