Month: November 2024

Matt Yglesias says today that although serious crime is down, "a lot of lower-level disorder that spiked alongside shootings in 2020 never went back to normal."

Unlike in some areas where I think the Biden administration made clear policy errors, I don’t know that they did anything wrong about this national epidemic of low-level disorder. But for whatever reason, they weren’t willing or able to articulate the basic fact, visible to everyone, that standards of conduct had slipped and that something needed to be done.

I agree that public disorder needs to be policed. Not because it's likely to have any effect on more serious crime, but for its own sake. Civic disorder is annoying at best and scary at worst. There's no reason we should ignore quality-of-life issues like this.

But I'm skeptical of this "epidemic" of disorder. Partly this is because I can't figure out why there should be one. There are a few things that might plausibly underlie low-level disorder, but they're mostly getting better. For example, homelessness has declined everywhere but California until a tiny spike last year:

Aside from recreational marijuana, drug use is down for all age groups.¹ Ditto for alcohol abuse.

Thanks to lower lead poisoning among children, antisocial behavior of all kinds has dropped dramatically among teens:

Add this all up and homelessness is mostly down; drug use is down; teen behavior is better; plus incomes are up and poverty is down. None of this means public disorder hasn't increased. But it does mean it would sure be mysterious if it has.

So what's the evidence for increasing disorder? It's very thin: airline passengers are acting up and traffic deaths are still high. On the other hand, in New York City transit crime is declining and 311 calls to report nuisances have plummeted:

Ruthless shoplifting gangs terrorizing drug stores and supermarkets are in the news regularly, but retailers themselves don't report any rise:

Anecdotally, Charles Fain Lehman visited Chatanooga and reported back: "Even as violent crime has largely receded, there are multiple indicators suggesting that another problem persists: disorder." But if you read his very detailed piece, there's not much there. Even minor crimes are mostly down over the past couple of years.

I just don't know. This is another example of vibes vs. data and I don't know which side to take. It's especially difficult in this case because there's no measure of low-level disorder to look at. It's hard to even come up with credible proxies.

As always, the question isn't whether civic disorder exists. Of course it does. Most big cities have open-air drug markets, homeless encampments, reckless drivers, and people who are just plain annoying. But is there more of it? It sure seems like there's no reason there should be, and what little data we have doesn't support the notion of a big rise. Any thoughts?

¹Marijuana use is flat among teens and up among adults, mostly thanks to legalization.

Boris Epshteyn is in big trouble:

A top adviser to President-elect Donald Trump asked potential administration nominees to give him monthly consulting fees in exchange for advocating for them to Trump, a written review by Trump’s legal team concluded.... It found that among those whom Epshteyn had unsuccessfully solicited for payment was Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for treasury secretary.

Trump commissioned the report after he heard allegations that Epshteyn had been asking potential Cabinet nominees and others for money, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal document.

Epshteyn is already under indictment in Arizona for promoting a fake electors scheme to overturn the 2020 election, but obviously Trump doesn't care about that. He's also been charged with assault a couple of times stemming from bar fights, but Trump doesn't care about that either. He's also something of an asshole, getting into screaming matches with colleagues, but Trump doesn't care. And guess what?

Trump told Just the News in a brief interview, "I suppose every President has people around them who try to make money off them on the outside. It's a shame but it happens," he said. "But no one working for me in any capacity should be looking to make money. They should only be here to Make America Great Again."

He continued to Just the News: "No one can promise any endorsement or nomination except me. I make these decisions on my own, period."

It sure doesn't sound like Trump cares much about this either. "It's a shame," but hey, in Trumpworld everyone is expected to be on the take.

This is the Iron Mountain Chapel, about 50 miles east of Twentynine Palms off Highway 62. It was built back when Gen. George Patton was training tank troops at the Desert Training Center he founded in California during World War II.

There were actually two chapels at Camp Iron Mountain, one Catholic and one Protestant. This is the Catholic one. The General Patton Memorial Museum is nearby at Chiriaco Summit off Interstate 10.

Yesterday I posted a brief item noting that the CDC never recommended that schools be closed during COVID. In fact, by July 2020, shortly before the new school year was about to start, they were strongly recommending that schools open in the fall.

So why did so many schools close? The answer is that the decisions were mostly made by states and local school districts, partly based on CDC guidance about how to reopen safely. To that extent the CDC did play a role, though probably one that even its critics wouldn't take issue with. Their safety guidance was generally pretty solid.

More important was probably public opinion. It's easy to forget what things were like when COVID was new, but people were scared and most parents didn't want schools to reopen quickly. Here's a KFF poll from July 2020, just before the start of the new school year:

Of the people polled, 63% wanted to open schools later rather than sooner. 71% said schools needed more resources and weren't ready to open. And 70% were worried their child would get COVID if they returned to school.

The results leaned even more heavily toward closure among low-income parents—which makes sense since they were most likely to live in areas where schools were likely to have trouble reopening safely.

Other polls at the same time showed similar results. In one poll, parents favored closure over reopening by 54-36%. In an EdChoice poll, 69% said they'd enroll their kids in distance learning if their school offered it. In an Ipsos poll, only 16% favored full reopening. An S360 poll gave the same result in California.

Most polls also showed noticeable differences between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats consistently took COVID more seriously and were more likely to favor keeping schools closed, so it's no surprise that Democratic states and cities were the most likely to close schools. They were doing what their constituents wanted.

And despite what we all think now, these policies were relatively popular at the time. An Ipsos poll in late 2021, after a year of COVID and closures, showed that 75% of parents felt their local schools had done a pretty good job dealing with the pandemic:

The moral of all this is not to let your memory play tricks on you. It might seem obvious now that schools should have remained open, but parents at the time didn't all agree. Most of them were worried about possible learning loss—they weren't naive about that—but still favored caution about sending their kids back to classrooms. Under the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that local school boards did what they wanted.

POSTSCRIPT: As it happens, I was skeptical of school closings from the start. But even now it's not an open-and-shut case. The danger of sending kids back to school was probably small, but the evidence suggests the ill effects of closing schools was probably small too. There was significant learning loss, but it doesn't appear to be related to school closures. Everyone suffered equally, whether they attended classes in person or stayed home. See here, here, and here. It was something more broadly about the pandemic that caused learning loss, not distance learning.

In other words, a cost-benefit analysis of school closures is tricky even now.

Here are the states with the most progressive and most regressive tax systems:

In Minnesota the rich pay 70% more than the poor. In Florida the rich pay 79% less than the poor.

It will come as no surprise that every one of the progressive tax states voted for Kamala Harris and nearly all of the regressive tax states (8 out of 10) voted for Donald Trump.

In a word, no. Even at the very beginning of the pandemic, the CDC said only that schools might want to close depending on local transmission rates and known outbreaks—but even then said there was little evidence it helped more generally. After that they became positively evangelistic in their recommendations for schools to stay open (but to do it safely).

Here are excerpts from four CDC documents published during the first year of COVID. Not media or talking head perspectives. These are the CDC's actual words.

March 12, 2020: "There is a role for school closure" in response to outbreaks of COVID. However:

Short to medium closures do not impact the epi curve of COVID-19 or available health care measures (e.g., hospitalizations).... Other mitigation efforts (e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures. In other countries, those places who closed school (e.g., Hong Kong) have not had more success in reducing spread than those that did not (e.g., Singapore).

July 23, 2020: “It is critically important for our public health to open schools this fall,” said CDC Director Dr. Robert R. Redfield. “The CDC resources released today will help parents, teachers and administrators make practical, safety-focused decisions as this school year begins.”... The resources and tools made available today support how to open schools safely by promoting behaviors that prevent spread, [etc.].

August 1, 2020: While opening schools—like opening any building or facility—does pose a risk for the spread of COVID-19, there are many reasons why opening schools in the fall of 2020 for in-person instruction is important.

• Schools play a critical role in the wellbeing of communities
• Schools provide critical instruction and academic support
• Social and emotional health of students can be enhanced
  through schools
• Mental health of students can be fostered through school
  supports and services
• Continuity of other special services is important for student
  success

February 12, 2021: K–12 schools should be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures in the community have been employed, and the first to reopen when they can do so safely. Schools should be prioritized for reopening and remaining open for in-person instruction over nonessential businesses and activities.

The top chart shows total public K-12 spending as a percent of GDP. The bottom chart is the same for per-pupil spending. For this one I used the share per billion dollars of GDP to avoid a big mess of decimal places.

Here's an interesting thing. It starts with a typical outraged Twitter post:

Now suck in your gut and read this very long—but fascinating!—reply from Greg Koenig about why bolts like this cost so much and are worth every penny:

Fun fact.

In the outskirts of Portland is a nice little shop in an anonymous industrial park. You walk in to a little foyer with a folding card table and 9 thick, vacuum sealed Mylar bags, each about 1' long and 4" in diameter. They are sitting on top of about 70 pages of paperwork. This is the entirely daily production of this facility.

Inside are a bunch of old Mori Seiki NLX lathes — the old ones, before Mitsui bank let Dr. Mori train wreck the company with the DMG merger. Aside from a little wear on the interior paint, the 7 lathes look like they just came out of the showroom. In fact, the whole place looks like a machine tool showroom — spotlessly clean, with a thick, perfectly level urethane floor that a product photographer could use as a mirror white background plane in an Apple ad.

There are a few big things in our lives that are literally held together with a couple of fasteners. One example; every Boeing and Airbus engine is held onto the wing by only 2 bolts, and this is the shop that makes them. Boeing and Airbus both require multiple suppliers for critical components, so this is not the only shop that makes these bolts, but the nearest competitor is in Seattle (close to Boeing, but far enough away that the Cascadia Subduction Zone quake won't take both out).

The shop bay next door is equally clean, but contains a vacuum furnace and the most through inspection lab I've ever seen. X-ray and magnetic particle inspection, CMM, optical comparators. In the corner is a cherry red custom painted Lista cabinet where raw blanks are stored. An identical Lista cabinet in Green is at the opposite side of the shop. Raw material comes in, gets inspected, heat treated, inspected again, and moves from the Red to Green cabinet, collecting about half the paperwork along the way.

The blanks take about 3 days to go from a cylinder of Sandvik or Thyssen-Krupp steel into a bolt. One machine, the oldest, is used to rough the blank into a pair of concentric cylinders, the second oldest machine roughs the hex head, before the bolt is stress relieved and allowed to rest for 36 hours. Another machine finishes the hex and applies chamfers, these are final surfaces.

The final step is the threads, where things get interesting. They are cut in 3 steps; roughed, semi-finished, and finished. The secret sauce here is that a new insert is always used as the semi-finisher, and the semi-finished state is very very carefully measured to compensate that exact insert. The final finishing pass is taken in one (surprisingly healthy) hit using the data from the semi-finishing pass to be on-dimension within about 2µm. The key insight they had is that you get a better surface finish off of a tool that has already taken a couple of cuts. The threads look like you wrapped a mirror around a spiral staircase; their process is so dialed-in that their work competes with thread-grinders for dimensional and surface quality. Even so, just before inspecting with old-school thread wires at the machine — the guy running the lathe spins it at about 500rpm and reaches in with a Bright Boy stick and touches them up, runs his fingers over them, and gives them the most important QC they'll receive. This guy has been on this machine for 15 years; nearly every aircraft passenger aircraft in the sky is held together by at least one bolt that has passed his touch inspection.

Of course, the engineers in Renton or Toulouse won't just accept that Mitch in Gresham touched this bolt so it is good... so whole reams of paperwork are geared by regularly calibrated Zeiss metrology gear that does a complete dimensional inspection, another magnetic particle inspection (3 in total), and an X-ray. Having said that, Mitch rejects more than Zeiss does (about 2-3%).

You want to pay more than $45 for each of these bolts.

Now, the particular bolts Koenig is describing actually cost $2,300: as he puts it, $100 for the bolt and $2,200 for the inspection paperwork. But the bolt in the picture is its little cousin. It doesn't hold engines onto wings, but it's an airplane bolt with similar quality requirements.

This is not the explanation for every high-priced milspec component. But you should know which is which before you shoot off your mouth.

I have a post all teed up about Why Kamala Lost, but I can't quite pull the trigger on publishing it. Here's why:

This is not the Democratic (popular vote) winning margin each year. It's the change from the previous election. For example, Joe Biden won by 4.5% in 2020 and Kamala Harris lost by 1.5% in 2024. That's a change of -6.0%.

The House vote barely changed at all in 2024. In 2022 Democrats lost by 2.7%. This year they lost by 3.0%.

These are just not world historical changes, especially in a weird election that featured a global mutiny against incumbents and a JV candidate hastily subbed in three months before Election Day.

In other words, there may not be an awful lot to explain. Maybe Democratic losses were just the result of a routine pendulum swing and the breast beating over causes is overwrought.

I do think there are some lessons for Democrats in this year's election, and I may yet write about them. But at this point I feel like every theory should be treated as highly provisional. Election results bounce around all the time, and this year's bounce wasn't wildly out of the ordinary. Maybe it really was just the price of eggs.

Ezra Klein has a long interview today about governance with Steve Teles and Jennifer Pahlka. The gist is that our government bureaucracies really are terrible and liberals are in denial about the need for massive reform. It left me with many thoughts because I think, overall, it hit the wrong targets.

It's hard to adopt just the right tone for this because, God knows, big bureaucracies have lots of problems and liberals aren't always willing to face up to them. I'm really not trying to be a big defender of the bureaucracy here. But maybe a little one? This turned out to be very long, so let's take it in small pieces.

KLEIN [on defending institutions]: The core conflict right now, the irresolvable one, the ones that two parties will not compromise on, is over institutions: Democrats staff and defend them. Republicans loathe and seek to raze them to the ground.

This is nothing new. Remember when William F. Buckley said he'd rather be governed by 2,000 random names from the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard? That was 1963. As a possible explanation for the recent travails of the Democratic Party it really doesn't work.

PAHLKA [On the disconnect between policy and delivery]: Probably the biggest example of it would be the Biden administration’s insistence on the success of the big bills that were passed — the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure, where they are incredible accomplishments legislatively. And if you look at it from that perspective, he is absolutely a hero. But if you look at from the perspective of people in states in the U.S. whose economies have been hollowed out: It took so long to get that money out the door.

This just isn't true. First, here's construction spending after the CHIPS Act:

That's fast! And despite lots of early warnings, new fabs have been opening on time and on budget. Second, here's estimated IRA spending on green energy projects:

This represents about two-thirds of the total authorized. It's going out the door and being used about as fast as you could hope for with such enormous sums.

Third, the infrastructure bill. The headline number is that it was a $1.2 trillion bill. But that's grossly misleading. It allocated only $550 billion in new funding, and as always, that's over a decade. It's really a $55 billion bill, and that money is being spent just fine.

KLEIN [on nothing ever getting done]: The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later — four years — the first 28 stations opened.

Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

So, yeah: I’m worried about our institutions. I’m angry at our institutions. I don’t want to defend them. I want them to work.

Well, yes, but I don't think this is due to dysfunctional liberal bureaucracies. It's due to a different liberal delusion: the unshakable belief that America desperately needs lots of high-speed rail. This has been going on for 60 years, not just 15, and we still have no high-speed rail.

The bureaucracy isn't at fault for this. It would happily dole out the money for HSR if it was truly a priority for anyone. But it's not. California is ground zero for HSR boondoggles, and only a part of that can be blamed on inefficient bureaucratic rules—though there are plenty of those. Mostly it can be blamed on voters and politicians who have succumbed to hazy liberal dreams of gleaming trains that have no basis in reality.

TELES [on why bureaucracies deteriorate]: Things go wrong. There’s a scandal. We add a new process, we add a new procedure — without really thinking about how it interacts with all the rest of it. And so we shouldn’t necessarily think that the problems that Jen is describing are a result of the fact that anybody designed this thing to operate this way. It’s really the result of just additional layers of accretion without corresponding layers of destruction.

This is true. When we set out to build things these days there are lots of hoops to jump through. The project has to be let out to competitive bidding. You have to write an environmental impact report. Maybe you have to ensure some of the work is done by small businesses. There are minority set asides. Buy American provisions. Zoning variances. Environmental justice requirements. Public comment periods for new rulemaking. Grievance procedures for anyone who's unhappy. Etc.

But with few exceptions these hurdles have nothing to do with the bureaucracy per se. They're put in place by legislators at all levels. Liberals want to ensure social fairness. Conservatives want to make sure liberal interest groups can't cheat. Local politicos want to retain power. And everyone wants to make sure nothing objectionable happens near their own house.

This is where the blame lies. Bureaucracies themselves are just the unlucky bastards who are forced to make it all work.

PAHLKA [on outside forces]: We’re skipping over a really important point here that Steve touched on when he mentioned scandal, which is the adversarial nature of all this.... Steve was referring to that earlier, sort of the ’60s and ’70s that’s still very much in our DNA as Democrats — that is to sue, sue, sue. Well, if we sue, sue, sue all the time for all sorts of reasons —

Suing government, here, you mean?

PAHLKA: Exactly. Suing the government. Then every time we sue, we make the government more risk averse. There’s a lot of adversarialism out there, and the natural result of that is going to be a system in which you defend your judgments by using no judgment.

No argument here. This is absolutely a problem—though it's pretty ecumenical these days. Block a rich person's view and they sue over some alleged deficiency in the EIR. Build something near a poor neighborhood and liberal interest groups will sue. Build near a residential area and owners will sue over increased traffic. Violate someone's notion of government overreach and conservative interest groups will sue. Award a contract and the losers will sue.

But—this is obviously a broad problem that bureaucracies themselves do nothing to cause. All they can do is react, and it's true that sometimes the reaction can be a sort of fetal crouch where dotting i's becomes far too important.

If you want to solve this, the answer lies mostly in legislation that rolls back protections a bit and provides safe harbors if the truly important rules are followed.

KLEIN [on the problems with big cities governed by Democrats]: I was looking at some election results. And it was weighting the shift in the vote by the density of the place. And what it shows is that in the most dense places, which is to say the big cities, the vote turned against Democrats the most... These are places where people were very exposed to blue state governance, exposed to the cost of living, exposed to housing crises, exposed to disorder on the streets, homeless encampments.

I doubt very much that this is responsible for a sudden shift over the past four years. More likely it's due to the fact that Kamala Harris didn't campaign in these places and lots of Democrats in deep blue cities stayed home because they knew their votes didn't matter. The obsessive coverage this year of the seven swing states as the only ones that mattered may have had something to do with it.

But I want to make a larger point. It's true that big cities have deteriorated over the decades, but it's a couple of big trends that are largely responsible for this. The first one is also the most obvious: Both the rich and the upper middle class have increasingly disengaged from cities, partly by moving to the suburbs and partly by segregating themselves into gated enclaves where they can shut out the problems of urban life. This has left central cities increasingly subject to the pathologies of the poor, the poorly educated, and the homeless.

Second, the poor communities themselves have deteriorated. In the past, the smartest and most capable of the poor stayed put their entire lives because no other options were open to them. They ended up as the natural leaders of these communities. But no longer. We've gotten too good and too aggressive at identifying these people and sending them to college—where they become part of the middle class and move away. As a result, central cities are left rudderless and even poorer.

These problems obviously have nothing to do with governance, either red or blue. It's just the way things are.

TELES [on the high cost of building stuff]: A piece by Leah Brooks and Zach Liscow...shows in exhaustive detail just how much the costs of building infrastructure in the U.S. have gone up, which Jen was talking about earlier. And they demonstrate that the explanation for that increase, which I think is behind a lot of Americans’ sense that nothing works, is citizen voice. That there’s so many opportunities for often quite minoritarian intervention in building things, that everything takes very long. It takes a lot more. And the other thing is government doesn’t get big wins that translate into trust and a willingness to invest it with new resources.

"Citizen voice." Not bureaucracy. Beyond that, though, I'm a big fan of this chart:

New York City has astronomical infrastructure costs. But more broadly, the US is fairly middling. There's a popular myth that America has fantastically higher building costs than other countries, but it's largely based on (a) New York City, which gets a ton of media coverage; (b) comparison of a few high-profile HSR projects; and (c) massive building throughout China, where the government doesn't have to care about public approval. Overall, though, it really is mostly a myth. There's probably a kernel of truth to it because America really is a litigious nation, but no more than that.

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Here's a story: FEMA has long handed out money to disaster victims, but in the past they required people to spend it only on approved things. If you ran out and needed more you had to show receipts that demonstrated you had followed the rules.

Then they decided this was dumb and rescinded the rule. That's an example of a bureaucracy killing a regulation on its own. It can be done.

But it also opens up FEMA to blowback. Someday an activist group is going to collect evidence of fraud and hand it to a friendly politician, who is then going to demand hearings that generate blaring headlines about millions of wasted taxpayer dollars. You can practically see it in your mind's eye already.

And it's not as if the criticism will be wrong. You'd like to think that people could be relied on to use common sense, but they can't be and we all know it. It would be nice, for example, if all we had to tell restaurant managers was, For God's sake, just make sure the place is clean and the refrigerator works and employees wash their hands. But as we become richer we also become more risk averse. That means lots of detailed rules—the refrigerator must close automatically and contain separate areas for meat and vegetables and run at 34-36°F and shelving must be stainless steel. This is not the bureaucracy at work. This is the result of the public reading The Jungle and Silent Spring and Food Politics and demanding action. But that's not all. At the same time we also demand that cheating can't be allowed. And the environment be kept clean. And the workplace be safe. And residents have some say in what gets built next door. So we demand politicians pass some rules about this and naturally they do what they're told.

This doesn't always turn out the way we'd like. But it's not really the fault of the bureaucracy. For that, we just need to look in the mirror.