Month: October 2024

How's that $20 minimum wage for fast food workers working out in California? Today Michael Hiltzik points to a couple of new studies that have some early data.

Both conclude, unsurprisingly, that wages have gone up for fast food workers. But what about prices and employment?

The first study, from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at Berkeley, says the law increased prices to consumers by 3.7%—or about 50 cents for an average burger & fries combo.

On employment, unfortunately, the report seems to have misidentified its own data. It compares California employment to US employment and says that starting in 2024 "California fast food employment begins to grow faster than U.S. fast food employment." But their own chart shows just the opposite. Here's a clearer take on the data:

California employment in fast food relative to the US has been declining since the start of 2023. As it happens, though, the report's overall conclusion of no effect is probably correct anyway: the decline is relatively steady and nothing special happened when the $20 wage took effect. On the other hand, there is a drop from April to June, equal to about 10,000 workers. It's possible this is due to the new law taking effect, though it looks mostly like noise to me. Time will tell.

The second study comes from the Harvard Kennedy School, but it relies on a self-selected sample from Facebook and Instagram. Based on their latest wave of survey results they conclude that average hours worked hasn't changed, but they have no way of estimating total employment. So it's of limited use.

Nickel summary: California's $20 fast food law raised wages considerably and prices a little bit. It probably had no effect on employment, but it's too soon to tell. There might have been a small effect.

Poor Charlie. He brushed up against a thorn or something and opened up a wound on his back leg. Naturally he wants to lick it to death, so he's confined to the cone for a while.

Charlie is weirdly afraid of the camera now that he has the cone on. I don't know why. In particular, he recoils at the sound of the shutter, which really doesn't make sense. But you can see in this picture that he's suspicious even before the shutter goes off.

Tyler Cowen asks today, "Why are fewer men going to college?" This is a common belief, but it's really a myth. Male enrollment in college has been stable for the past 30 years:

It's true that the number of women enrolling in college has gone up substantially during this period. It's also true that male enrollment is generally lower here than it is overseas (though women outnumber men everywhere).

But it's not true that fewer men are going to college. It's the same as it's ever been.

Mehdi Hasan tweets about the conservative retreat from reality:

I did @bbcquestiontime with a live audience including Trump voters in Philly this week. The Trump voters booed and laughed sarcastically at every official statistic mentioned from the stage: unemployment, inflation, even Border Patrol stats on border crossings. They don’t believe anything. It’s scary. And dangerous for the country.

Hasan was responding to an Atlantic article by Charlie Warzel about the insane misinformation surrounding the recent hurricanes:

It’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.

....Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

Needless to say, I have no general disagreement with either Hasan or Warzel. And yet, I still wonder: has this kind of behavior really increased or is it simply more visible thanks to Twitter and other social media?

I can't figure out a way to test this. I'm not talking about garden variety conspiracy theories here—JFK, 9/11, the 2020 election—I'm talking about the flat-out insane stuff. Faked moon landing. Mena airfield. Bogus national statistics. Has there been a rise in the number of people who are, as Warzel puts it, dissociated from reality?

Maybe someday I'll figure out some clever way to test this. In the meantime, though, I came across a surprising and weird related thing. If you look at polls of trust in government, Democrats act fairly normally: they generally trust Democratic presidents more than Republican presidents. But here's Republican trust in government over the years:

Republican trust in government routinely falls off a cliff at the end of Republican presidencies. This starts before election years and before Democrats are elected. Generally speaking, their trust in government doesn't fall during Democratic presidencies. It falls, apparently, after one of their own has been in office a few years and betrayed them by not delivering what they wanted.

It's possible this is a coincidence. Both Bushes ended their presidencies with recessions and Trump ended his with COVID. Maybe it's bad luck. But I wonder. And I wonder if it's related to periodic outbreaks of conservative insanity?

NOTE: Obviously this doesn't explain what's happening right now at the end of a Democratic presidency. Nor does it offer much insight into whether our current insanity is actually normal but simply more visible than before. But it's still interesting, no?

It looks like the market has rendered a verdict on Elon Musk's big cybertaxi announcement last night:

Musk told the audience that anyone who didn't believe in Tesla's driverless future shouldn't be an investor in the company. It looks like they took him at his word. It's just the usual Musk vaporware, same as always.

As usual, if you really want to judge where autonomous car technology is, look to Waymo. They've (finally!) started broad testing on freeways, and you can legit set a Waymo car on its way and then take a nap while it drives you around. I don't think they'll quite make my forecast of a real driverless car on sale to the public by 2025, but it will be close.

The Wall Street Journal reports that not only is inflation under control, in some areas prices are actually dropping:

Businesses that sell a range of products from IKEA sofas to Air Jordan sneakers have said in recent weeks that they have lowered prices this year. In part, that is because many companies increased prices rapidly in preceding years when supply chain and labor costs rose, and flush consumers were willing to pay more.

This is not really news: the price of durable goods has been going down for more than a year:

Durable goods (like Ikea furniture) today cost 2.9% less than a year ago. Nondurable goods (like Nike sneakers) are down 0.7%.

The flip side is that inflation in services, which is more sensitive to labor costs, is still running at 4.7%. It's continuing to come down, but slowly.

Here is Donald Trump tonight, rambling about Elon Musk's reusable rockets:

And they're coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace with a circle. Boom. It reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He'd have eight circles and he couldn't fill them up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.

OK, I give up. Biden's eight circles? wtf is he talking about?

The American Association of University Professors has issued a new policy that supports the mandatory use of "DEI statements." These are written accounts by faculty members of how they advance the goals of diversity in the workplace, often used as part of the decision to promote or grant tenure:

Since the 1990s, many universities and colleges have instituted policies that use DEI criteria in faculty evaluation for appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion, including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service.

....Some critics contend that such policies run afoul of the principles of academic freedom. Specifically, they have characterized DEI statements as “ideological screening tools” and “political litmus tests.”

I don't think DEI statements infringe on academic freedom any more than, say, a required statement about how you try to be an effective teacher. With or without them, professors remain free to say anything they want, including the opinion that DEI statements are stupid.

My problem is wholly different: I think it's clear DEI statements are a charade that strips the dignity from everyone involved. Nobody takes these statements seriously and everybody knows it, but grown men and women are nevertheless forced to submit vapid boilerplate to any committee with power over their careers. Not only is this vaguely humiliating, it sends an active message that it isn't really something to be taken seriously. Just check the box and move on.

But there's another problem too:

In the past two decades the share of Black professors has barely budged, increasing a grand total of 0.8 percentage points. Considering that the overall Black population share has also increased by 0.8 points during the same period, this is essentially zero progress.

In other words, whatever else you can say about them, DEI statements clearly aren't doing much good. Insisting on a transparent charade is bad enough, but insisting on one that doesn't even work makes no sense at all.

Over at New York, John Herrman voices a common complaint: Twitter used to be a decent place to get news about breaking events but it's now just a cesspool.

If, yesterday, you found yourself in the path of Hurricane Milton or were concerned about friends or family in Florida, you might have logged on, out of habit, to see what was happening. You would have encountered something worse than useless. On a functional level, the app is now centered on the algorithmic “For You” page, a sloshing pool of engagement chum in which a Category 5 hurricane gathering power in the Gulf is left to compete with videos of car crashes, posts from Elon Musk–adjacent right-wing maniacs, and a dash of whatever poorly targeted interest-based bait the platform thinks you might engage with, all collected from the past couple weeks.

Genuine question here: If you care at all about what you see on Twitter, why would you ever use the "For You" feed? Of course it's garbage. But no one with a room temperature IQ should ever go near it.

And yet I hear endless complaints about the "For You" feed even though Twitter is by no means "centered" on it. If you simply curate who you follow normally and then use the "Following" feed, Twitter will be fine. And if you want breaking news, hashtags and trending feeds still seem to work OK.

Of course, this assumes that Elon doesn't do away with the "Following" feed someday. I wouldn't put it past him. But he hasn't done it yet.

BY THE WAY: Elon has reportedly lost upwards of $30 billion on his acquisition of Twitter. Given that he now uses it primarily as a forced firehose of support for Donald Trump, should this be considered the biggest campaign contribution in the history of the world?

Let's see. In his grand giveaway tour, Donald Trump has now casually proposed making the following tax free:

• Tips
• Overtime
• Social Security benefits
• Auto loans
• "Double taxation" of overseas income

How about no taxation of crypto profits? Or lottery winnings? That's not fair, is it? Or maybe yard sale profits? Or anything sold on eBay? Or Christmas bonuses? Come on. There's lots of fertile ground left here.

This is all ridiculous, the Cheyne-Stokes breathing of a dying fealty to tax cuts uber alles. As for me, I'm not a politician so I don't have to worry about pandering to voters. Instead I can just say the simple truth: I'm no deficit hawk, but it's still become obvious that the deficit is out of control and needs to be reined in. So forget all the tax breaks. What we need to do is return to the tax rates we had in the late 1990s—which was a pretty prosperous time, as I recall.

This is approximate but pretty close. If we simply returned to the tax rates of 2000 we'd increase revenue by about $850 billion—and cut the deficit by half. Add in some moderate payroll tax increases to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent and you'd be up to $1.2 trillion. There's not much scope for budget cuts, but you could probably find another $100 billion there if you tried.

This reduces the deficit to $600 billion or so, and that will mechanically reduce interest rates and therefore interest payments too. The deficit would be all but gone in a few years.

Easy peasy, except that no one is willing to do it despite the fact that our experience during the Clinton era suggests it would work great and not overburden anyone. To summarize:

• Return personal and corporate rates to 2000 levels.
• Increase Social Security taxes from 6.2% to roughly 7.2% and Medicare taxes from 1.45% to maybe 1.75%. This is an inevitable consequence of demographics and everyone knows it.
• Find about 5% in budget cuts to the military, domestic programs, and welfare spending.
• Bank a few hundred billion dollars in interest payments as a result of reduced interest rates.

We could literally do this tomorrow with very little pain if we felt like it. We're not Greece, after all. We're the most powerful economy in the world with loads of leeway to do what we need to. Instead we seem dedicated to running ourselves into a ditch and eventually being forced to make genuinely painful choices. Stupid.