Month: August 2024

This is apropos of nothing in particular. It's mainly just for reference:

When tech companies hire people, they're hiring from the pool of STEM college graduates. So, for example, if you read that some Silicon Valley company is 20% Asian, you shouldn't compare that to Asians' 6% share of the population. You should compare it to their 15% share of STEM degrees. When you do that, it turns out Asians are only modestly overrepresented, not hugely overrepresented.

Likewise, if the same company is 6% Black, that's roughly proportionate, not a huge underrepresentation.

Use these numbers as rough baselines to evaluate hiring in tech companies. Someday we can hope that all these figures match shares of population, but until then companies have no choice but to work with what universities produce. That's what this is.

Every month the BLS publishes employment figures. These numbers are calculated from a survey and then adjusted based on estimated births and deaths of business enterprises.

That's a little iffy, so every year the figures are re-calibrated based on state unemployment data, which is more accurate. Here's what the revisions have looked like over the past couple of decades:

Even by my standards, this is a snoozer. The only reason to bother posting the chart is because of Donald Trump's tedious bellowing that it demonstrates CHEATING on the part of Joe Biden. And even that wouldn't have prompted me to put this up but for the opportunity it gives me to print this howler from Bloomberg:

It’s not the first time GOP members have accused a Democratic administration of cooking the books when it comes to the labor market. Under President Barack Obama, they argued the government was favoring an unemployment metric that made the economy look better. Democrats traded similar accusations when Republicans in Congress rewrote the way the economic effects of legislation are measured.

It's not usually my gig to complain about news outlets that bend over backwards to demonstrate "evenhandedness." But come on. According to Bloomberg, Republicans complain when the numbers are the same as they've always been. Democrats complain when Republicans rewrite the numbers.

These are not the same thing. Sometimes one side is just less honest than the other. Why not accept it?

I haven't written much about the lead-crime link lately because there hasn't been much to write about. Today there is. Beware: a righteous rant is coming.

Many years ago Steven Levitt and John Donohue—Levitt is one half of the Freakonomics duo—postulated that the crime decline of the '90s was due to Roe v. Wade. "Children who are unwanted at birth are at risk of a range of adverse life outcomes and commit much more crime later in life," they explain, so if there were fewer unwanted babies after 1973 they posit that there would be less crime 20 years later.

Today, Andrew Gelman sent me off the deep end by quoting a recent update from Levitt and Donohue:

Though there is not complete acceptance of our hypothesis among academics, all agree that if our paper is not correct, then there is no viable explanation for the enormous drop in crime in America that started in the early 1990s. Indeed, there is not even an arguable theory to supplant the abortion-crime link. . .

Jesus Christ. Levitt and Donohue are well aware that violent crime dropped all over the world in the '90s  but abortion was legalized only in the US. Their theory plainly explains nothing. What does, despite their cavalier dismissal, is lead.

Levitt and Donohue point to a simple correlation: abortion was legalized in the US in 1973 and crime started dropping about 18 years later. That's not much, but even at that their correlation doesn't hold up:

The abortion rate went up very suddenly over the space of five years, but crime didn't drop suddenly from 1990-95. It took 20 years. Furthermore, the abortion rate started decreasing sharply in 1990,¹ but crime didn't go back up starting in 2010.

This whole thing is just a coincidence that Levitt and Donohue stubbornly refuse to admit. 1973 is also right when lead use in gasoline started to drop. This is why their theory makes predictions that are mostly correct: because abortion increases happen to line up with lead reductions.

And there's more. Levitt and Donohue have a single nationwide correlation and a few differential state correlations. That's it. But so does lead, and as I've said many times before, if that's all there were I never would have written about it in the first place. But there's far more. There are global studies. There are neighborhood studies. There are studies from the early 20th century. There are prospective studies that track individuals from birth to adulthood. There are brain imaging studies that explain precisely what lead exposure does to developing brains.

In other words, not only is there an "arguable theory" for the crime drop of the '90s, there's a theory with absolutely mountains of evidence behind it. It was gasoline lead.

But wait. Are there any studies that suggest the lead hypothesis is wrong? Well, there are some dumb ones. For example, a study that looked only at homicide and only during the '80s. That's so stupid it beggars the imagination. Or there's one that uses a different measure of crime, but also shows a 96% correlation (!) between, for example, carjacking and assault. This also beggars the imagination.

To my knowledge, there's only one serious data point that pushes against the lead hypothesis: a meta-analysis that concluded (a) there was strong evidence for lead causing crime, but (b) there was also evidence of publication bias. That is, studies that found lead-crime links got published but studies that didn't were tossed out.

This has to be taken seriously, but I'm skeptical of it. Measures of publication bias are necessarily fairly crude, and there are lots of reasons to think that lead studies are unlikely to be rejected just because they showed small or no effects. That would be very publication worthy!

I'm usually a little more relaxed about this, but I'm pretty fed up with criminologists who steadfastly refuse to admit the obvious. No one thinks that lead is exclusively responsible for crime, but if you're looking for an explanation of the crime drop of the '90s and aughts, gasoline lead is it. The evidence by now has piled up so high it's all but irrefutable. What's more, aside from lead Levitt and Donohue are correct that there really aren't any other plausible theories.

The dead enders need to pull their heads out of the sand. Gasoline lead caused crime to go up in the '60s and '70s, and the end of gasoline lead allowed it go back down in the '90s and aughts. There's not much else to it.

¹Ironically, this was probably due to lead. The same mechanism that explains crime also explains less teen pregnancy and therefore fewer abortions.

Welp, here's something you probably didn't expect Donald Trump to say:

He's lying, of course, but that's not the point. The point is that abortion bans have proven to be such a disaster for conservatives that Trump now feels the need to effectively abandon his opposition to abortion altogether. Conservative Philip Klein calls it what it is:

The idea that his administration would be “great” for “reproductive rights” is hard to interpret in any other way than as an affirmatively pro-choice statement. By the common usage of the term, if you support reproductive rights it means you want broader access to abortion.

....In addition to being a moral abomination, it’s unclear what this does for him politically. With this post, Trump will further alienate pro-lifers and divide his own party while doing absolutely zero to win over anybody pro-choice.

This is all part and parcel of the obvious fact that Trump has never cared about abortion. Hell, I'd bet my big toe that he's paid for a few in his life. Abortion is and always has been a purely transactional issue for Trump: as long as pro-lifers help him get elected, he'll be pro-life. If they become baggage, he'll drop them.

That's always been the way it is. But it's only now that it's becoming too obvious to ignore.

Hilbert was really into our picture taking session yesterday.

The Washington Post has news:

Good. This is yet another reason to vote against Trump, as if you needed one.

(I wonder what RFK Jr. got in return for his endorsement? You know there has to be something.)

New home sales increased by 71,000 in July, bringing the total number to an annualized rate of 739,000. Adjusted for population, this is 2.19 new houses sold per thousand people:

This looks pretty healthy: we're holding steady at the level from just before the pandemic. But if you zoom out and take a longer view, things don't look quite so sanguine:

With the exception of the tail end of the bursting of the housing bubble, new home sales are near all-time lows. And we're unquestionably at an all-time non-recessionary low. The only years with lower totals were 1981, 1991, and 2008-18.

Kamala Harris says we need to build more homes. That's true. We should get this number up to a steady rate of 3 per thousand, or about one million homes per year. Over a decade, this would amount to an additional 3 million single-family homes.

But—and say this quietly—all 3 million of those additional homes are needed in California. The rest of the country is mostly fine.

Over at National Review, Charles Cooke says Kamala Harris's convention speech was fine but didn't really say anything about what she wants to accomplish as president:

Harris’s Speech Advanced Harris — and Nothing Else Besides

I agree wholeheartedly with the commentators who have suggested that the address was “unthreatening” for swing voters or undecideds. The important question, however, is why was it unthreatening? And the answer is that it was unthreatening because, other than on abortion, where she is already ahead, Harris said nothing of consequence.

....She has become so much of a cipher that even her own supporters cannot tell journalists what she stands for. This may well help her stay ahead in the polls for the next 70 days or so, but it will not help her advance the ball. And in politics, as in football, it is advancing the ball, not possessing it, that is the final aim of the enterprise.

This would all be true if this were an ordinary year. But it's not. Unlike most candidates in most years, Harris has only one real campaign goal: to prevent Donald Trump from winning office. That's it. Democrats are mostly willing to accept that everything else is small beer. Even the Gaza protesters couldn't gin up any enthusiasm for interfering with this singular overriding goal.

Beyond that, what do Democrats want? The honest answer is: nothing much. They're satisfied with any version of ordinary liberal goals—reproductive freedom, civil rights, helping the poor—and are happy to bury their differences in service of keeping Trump very far away from the levers of power.

Moderate Republicans should be delighted by this. The best they can hope for is an outcome that (a) rids their party of Trumpism and (b) doesn't concede much to Democrats in the process. And that's what they're getting. What more could they realistically ask for?

One of the things I liked about Kamala Harris's convention speech was her explicit plea at the end to reject Donald Trump's apocalyptic view of American decline:

You know, our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.

America, let us show each other and the world who we are and what we stand for: Freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities. We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world.

Consider what the country looks like if you view it through Trump's speeches:

• "70% of our people are living in poverty."
  According to the Census Bureau, the official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5%.
• "They’ve allowed, I believe, 15 million people into the country from all of these different places like jails, mental institutions."
  There are no figures for this because the real number is probably around zero.
• "More drugs are coming into our country right now than at any time in our history."
  By weight, drug seizures were 33% lower in July than in Trump's last month in office.
• "43% increase in violent crime nationwide, 60% increase in rape."
  According to the FBI, violent crime is down 19% since Trump left office. Rape is down 23%.
• Real wages are down 6% for Black families.
  Real income for Black families has increased 2.9% under Biden. (This is through 2022. It's probably more by now.)
• "Border crossings were up 1,000% compared to the same month last year, 1,000% compared to last year. And by the way, last year, it was 1,000% compared to the year before."
  Border crossings did increase under Biden, but obviously nowhere near 10,000%. As of July, border crossings are up 27% compared to Trump's last month in office.
• "Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that?"
  Since Biden entered office, employment has risen 8 million among native-born Americans vs. 3.5 million for non-natives. Of that, possibly half of the non-native jobs have gone to illegal immigrants, or about 15% of the total.
  
• "If Kamala gets in, we will have 50-60 million illegals from all over the world ferried right into our country."
  This is nonsensical.
• "Real" unemployment is much higher than reported under Biden.
  No it's not.
• "Inflation is destroying our families."
  The CPI inflation rate in July was 1.9%. Year-over-year it was 2.9%.
• "Gasoline prices are now $5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon."
  The average price of gasoline is currently $3.38.

If you take Trump seriously, America is besieged by poverty, native-born workers are unable to get jobs, drug use is skyrocketing, World War III is imminent if Democrats win, gasoline prices are through the roof, crime is rampant, wages are dropping, inflation is eating up our paychecks, the auto industry is about to implode, Democrats are working furiously to steal the election, Christianity is under siege, and before long a quarter of the country will be illegal immigrants.

If I believed all that, I might vote for Trump too. But none of it is.

Sure, we have problems. Everyone does. Ours include climate change, Black education gaps, drug overdose deaths, teen depression, and a high national debt.

But that's nothing compared to what's right with America. Economic growth is strong. Inflation is low again. Everyone who wants a job has one. Wages are going up. Illegal immigration is moderating. Manufacturing is set to grow. Poverty has been steadily dropping for a decade. We are no longer fighting in any wars. Our kids are mostly very well educated. We are energy independent. We conquered COVID in less than a year. Our entrepreneurial vigor is the best in the world by leagues. The poor have access to a wide range of assistance programs. Teen pregnancies are way down. Technological progress in medicine, AI, and renewable energy promises a spectacular future. And finally, with the usual exception of sub-Saharan Africa, the world is surprisingly peaceful.

It's long past time to rid ourselves of self-serving bellyachers like Trump and focus instead on the abundant strengths that make us, by a good bit, the best place to live in the world and the country with the brightest future.

Here is Donald Trump in North Carolina yesterday:

Remember when Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine. She met with Putin, and then three days later, he attacked.... She met with Putin to tell him, "Don’t do it." And three days later, he attacked.

Once again, we have a head scratcher. This is not the usual kind of falsehood, which has some small kernel of truth deep down. It's got nothing. Harris didn't meet with Putin and didn't tell him "Don't do it." End of story. It just flat didn't happen, and neither did anything else even remotely close.

So where did Trump get it? I suppose it was the same place where he discovered that Harris only recently started identifying as Black. Or that Harris's huge crowds were an AI invention. Or that a technical and long-planned annual revision of employment figures was really Joe Biden "fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America."

He's just literally making stuff up these days based (apparently) on the unhinged Twitter posts that he inhales every night. He is really and truly losing it in the face of a campaign he doesn't know how to fight.