Month: September 2024

This is a red admiral butterfly at the Schmetterling Haus in Vienna. Here is the life of a red admiral:

Male red admirals are territorial and perch during the afternoon until sunset....Males patrol their territory by flying around the perimeter between 7 and 30 times per hour. On average, territory holders interact with intruders 10 to 15 times per hour.

When another male encroaches on a red admiral's territory, the resident chases away the intruder, often in a vertical, helical path to disorient or tire out the intruder while minimizing the horizontal distance it travels from its perch. The red admiral immediately returns to its territory after chasing off encroaching males. Time spent patrolling increases as number of the intruder interactions increases.

Female red admirals will mate only with males who have a territory. It's important!

It turns out that the long awaited indictment against New York City mayor Eric Adams doesn't involve embezzlement or fraud or anything like that. It's just old-fashioned bribery. But very weird bribery.

The Feds allege that for the past decade Adams has been accepting lavish free travel and related luxury entertainment from . . .

A union? The mob? Fox News? Bzzz. The correct answer is the government of Turkey Türkiye.

The fuck? What does Türkiye want from the mayor of New York? Nothing in particular, it turns out. The bribes were just a retainer against possible future favors. They eventually called in their chits by asking Adams to kick the fire department's ass for holding up construction of a new consular building. Apparently Adams kicked the right asses and the building opened on time.

They also asked him to please not mention the Armenian genocide on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day—which must have been quite a trick if he said anything at all. I mean, what else do you talk about on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day?

There's other related mopery and dopery involving piles of cash from business moguls, all related to Türkiye. But as amusing as this penny ante corruption is, it's not the funniest part of the story. Investigators got hold of a telephone call where a Turkish Airlines manager is arranging a trip for Adams. "We can do it for 50 bucks," the manager says. No no, an Adams staffer says shrewdly. That's too obvious. Make it a thousand. No one will ever figure out that's a bribe.

Anna Merlan has a complete rundown of the hilarity here. We all knew Adams was a weird dude, but who knew he was such an incompetent and comical bribe taker?¹

¹Alleged bribe taker. Adams says he can explain everything.

We are not staying at our jobs as long as we used to:

The average for all workers in 2024 was 3.9 years. I chose to chart a single age group since older workers have held their jobs longer and therefore changes in age composition over the years can affect the numbers even if there's been no underlying change.

Every once in a while everybody in the country should look at this chart and be agog. We're the biggest country in the G7 by far and the fastest growing by far. That's not a combination you see very often.

The FBI has been a roll against politicians lately. Here's the roll call of national figures under investigation, indicted, or convicted of federal crimes this year:

Democrats

1. Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar
2. Presidential son Hunter Biden
3. New Jersey senator Robert Menendez
4. New York mayor Eric Adams
5. Oakland mayor Sheng Thao
6. Missouri Rep. Cori Bush

Republicans

1. Former president Donald Trump
2. Tennessee Rep. Andrew Ogles
3. New York Rep. George Santos

Who am I missing?

The third quarter is almost over, which means the Atlanta Fed's GDPnow estimate is probably pretty reliable by now. They're forecasting Q3 real GDP growth of 2.9%:

Not bad. They'll have an updated forecast tomorrow.

Something popped into my head this morning that reminded me of the golden rule of student testing: Always disaggregate by race.

So I did. I took NAEP reading scores for 2019 and 2022 and then added an estimate for 2023 from a Harvard/Stanford report earlier this year. Here's the result for 4th grade:

Everyone except Asians dropped during the pandemic and only made up a fraction of it in 2023. But now let's look at 8th grade:

Except among white students, losses were minuscule and had recovered almost entirely by 2023.

As I've pointed out frequently, score changes among young students often wash out. Scores for older students are more reliable. I would have checked 12th graders if the data was available.

In any case, the takeaway here is that reading ability has probably recovered almost entirely from the pandemic except among white kids, who are dragging down the average.

Why? One thing to always keep in mind is that the pandemic drop wasn't due to remote learning. The evidence is pretty clear that the effect of remote learning was quite small. It was something else that caused most of the problem, and it seems to have affected white kids the most.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH: If you look at SAT scores by race you see something similar: Scores dropped for some but not for others. However, the SAT is self-selecting and the data isn't recent, so you probably can't make much of it.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2023 came out today. Here's how we've been doing since the pandemic:

This is a direct survey of how much money we've been spending. Short answer: After inflation, we're still spending more. And it's not because of debt. Since 2019, total debt per adult has increased a grand total of $99 (adjusted for inflation). That compares to increased spending of more than $2,000 per adult.

And the spending numbers are the same by income level. Spending has increased for the poor, the rich, and the middle.

Stimulus money has run out. Savings have been depleted. But they worked when we needed them: employment has gone up; prime-age labor force participation has gone up; wages have gone up; and over the past year inflation has quieted. As a result, we have more money and we're spending more money.

Bottom line: The economy is good and things are better for everyone.

I almost forgot again that Wednesday is YouGov poll day. I guess maybe I have an excuse this week. Anyway, here it is:

Harris is now three points ahead nationally and things have been bouncing around that level for weeks within the margin of error. There's just nothing much to say about this except the banal "It's gonna be a close one!"

Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp has a piece today headlined "The 6 thinkers who would define a second Trump term." The gist is that the people surrounding Trump would no longer be establishment figures who try to rein him in, but true believers who will egg him on. And those true believers are all being influenced by the six intellectuals on Beauchamp's list.

I dunno. Maybe. You can read it and decide for yourself—though I'm especially skeptical that Curtis Yarvin has any true influence. But maybe I'm out of touch.

In any case, one of the six is Patrick Deneen, and for some reason this paragraph provoked me:

Deneen’s first big book, Why Liberalism Failed, argued that the shared philosophy of the American center — a liberalism focused on rights and individual freedom — had produced a miserable world. While claiming to liberate people to pursue their own life plan, liberalism in fact cut them off from traditional sources of community and stability. Americans were depressed, lonely, and immiserated — and they had their governing consensus to blame.

Maybe "provoked" is the wrong word. It's just that this critique is so common and so banal. Deneen focuses on the right-wing version: we need more religion, more local control of politics, and less centralized bureaucracy. Robert Putnam gave us the centrist version in Bowling Alone, which argues that social interaction and civic engagement have declined over the past few decades. And then there's the traditional lefty version, which focuses on the destructive influence of late capitalism and consumerism at the expense of what really matters in life. It's all the same thing. No less a lefty than Barack Obama recommended Deneen's best known book.

In other words, this idea that there's a spiritual hole in our lives has been a loud and persistent critique of modernism since at least World War II. Examples abound. The "rat race." Future Shock. Downshifting. The Whole Earth Catalog. Naomi Klein. God and Man at Yale. Social media panics. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

And maybe the modern world does leave a hole in our lives. Or maybe not. The World Happiness Report, which admittedly should be taken with a grain of salt, provides this list of the happiest and unhappiest places:

(The United States ranks 23rd out of 143 with a score of 6.73.) You will immediately notice something obvious. Generally speaking, the happiest countries are all rich, nonreligious, bureaucratic, peaceful, consumerist, well educated, and high tech. The unhappiest places are generally poor, traditional, badly educated, violent, corrupt, low-tech, and full of strong family bonds.

Now, happy is not the same thing as fulfilled, but this is still a helluva comparison. I suspect that our obsession with purpose and fulfillment is mostly possible only because we're rich and comfortable. People in those bottom ten countries don't have the time or energy to even think about it. They just want to make it to the next day, and religion and family bonds don't really do much to lighten their misery.

Beyond this, even if the hole is a genuine problem I keep wondering what people think we ought to do about it. On an individual level, sure, there are things that can help: therapy, self-help, meditation, religion, etc. But on a societal level? We're just not going back to the 19th century. Technological progress has boomed over the past century, so we're going to have lots of technology. Technology means complexity, so we're going to have big centralized bureaucracies to manage it. Big, complex bureaucracies require high levels of education, and education is pretty highly correlated with the decline of religious belief. Finally, we plainly prefer being rich to being poor, so we're going to have big corporations and a consumerist culture.

This is all way, way too big to be turned around by mere government policy. It just is. So while we can gripe about this stuff all we want, there's not a single person on earth who has any concrete idea what to do about it. Our only solution is better adaptation, not wholesale cultural revolution.

POSTSCRIPT: As a side note, it's especially nuts to think Donald Trump is going to do anything about this. He's rich, educated, nonreligious, in love with technology, runs a huge corporation, and couldn't care less about social bonds. If there's a single person on the planet who embodies the alleged hole in our souls, it's Donald Trump.