Month: December 2024

This is a rare archival photo of Hilbert and Charlie hanging out together back when Charlie was still a kitten. Well, kittenish. They were so cute together.

Today HUD released the 2024 figures for homelessness:

For the first time in a while California wasn't the big gainer in 2024. Its homeless population rose a modest 5,700 while the count in the rest of the country rose a whopping 113,000. I had to look at that number twice to make sure I'd read it right. It's double the next biggest increase (in 2023), four times the next biggest (2022) and 16x the next biggest (2010).

Between 2007 and 2020 the US homeless population (outside California) declined by 89,000. Since then it's ballooned by 168,000.

How is globalization coming along? This used to be a common topic of conversation, but ever since the COVID pandemic you might think globalization was nothing but a naive dream of 20th century economists that faded away and was then smashed to bits by Donald Trump and his tariffs.

But no. The KOF Swiss Economic Institute has been tracking globalization for years, and they report that outside of the US it's doing fine:

Since 2017 the KOF trade globalization index has fallen 5% in the US but has continued to grow 3% in the rest of the developed world.

And it's not just narrow trade globalization that's getting stronger. Here's their assessment of economic globalization more generally:

Note that the US isn't even among the top 20 countries. We're laggards, and you can't judge the success of globalization solely through the lens of American politics.

KOF also gauges things like social globalization and political globalization. The story there is the same: strong continuing growth but without the US in the lead. This might come as a surprise to an American public that long ago revolted against trade treaties and imports from China, but that's a purely parochial view. Globalization ticked down very slightly and very briefly during the pandemic, but that's it. It's still a big story of the 21st century.

During yesterday's Twitter rage-a-thon against Indian immigrants, Vivek Ramaswamy—the son of ultra-high achieving Indian immigrants—decided to hold forth on the problems of American culture:

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

....This can be our Sputnik moment...but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

The laughable implication here is that America in, say, the '50s was some kind of nerd utopia where valedictorians were the cool kids and jocks were looked down on. It wasn't. But I suppose it's understandable that Vivek thinks this. Check out his family:

Vivek’s father, V G Ramaswamy, did his schooling in Vadakkencherry. He went on to complete his pre-degree from Government Victoria College, Palakkad and graduated from REC Calicut — with first rank — before proceeding to the US, where he secured his MS and doctoral degrees. Ramaswamy also holds a degree in patent law and his wife Geetha is a [geriatric] psychiatrist.

This is about like an American kid whose parents are a Yale PhD and a Harvard Medical School grad. That family also cares more about their kids being valedictorians than captains of the basketball team.

This is top 1% culture, and it isn't very different in India vs. America. Mass culture isn't all that different either:

India is not some kind of genius monolith with a universal culture of noses in books. Ordinary kids there pay more attention to Bollywood and cricket than they do to quadratic equations. It only looks different if you compare their top 1% to our entire country.

Elon Musk, who spent the entire presidential campaign whipping the MAGA crowd into an anti-immigrant fervor, got involved in a Twitter scuffle today over H-1B visas for Indian engineers. Unsurprisingly, he's for them. But he was apparently sort of shocked to discover that the racists he baited during the campaign are...... racists. They don't care if Indians are smart or not. They just don't want 'em:

If you want the longer version of what went down, Noah Smith has you covered here.

Now, it so happens there are a lot of Indian immigrants in the US. They're second only to Mexicans:

The thing about Indian immigrants that makes them unique is that pretty much only the smartest ones come here. A million Indians have immigrated to the US over the past decade, and that's a lot. But it accounts for less than 0.1% of the Indian population. And the ones who come to America aren't just any old 0.1%, they're more or less the top 0.1% of the country. They're the ones who scored astronomically on national tests and graduated from the top universities. So it's no surprise they're super successful here. The top 0.1% of any country would be.

So do we want to welcome them to America? Hell yes. They're going to do great stuff no matter where they are, so our choice is either to compete against them or have them compete for us against the rest of the world. That's a no-brainer. Even the racists would get it if, instead of engineers, we were talking about football players. They eventually got used to Black guys playing basketball, after all.

But Musk still needs to learn what he's gotten himself roped into. He may have thought that all the MAGA folks who cheered his "woke mind virus" and anti-DEI schtick were doing it for noble reasons,¹ but today he learned that it's mostly just because they don't like brown people with funny accents. We'll see if he manages to remember this.

¹Although, honestly, that's hard to believe. Musk isn't just a smart guy, he's a smart guy from South Africa. He knows from racism.

CMS released a big slug of enrollment numbers for Obamacare last week and we now have a pretty good idea of how enrollment is going to turn out for 2025:

Enrollment in the Obamacare marketplace has doubled during Joe Biden's term in office. Part of this is due to more aggressive recruiting and part to the increased subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. Total Obamacare enrollment, including Medicaid expansion, is 43.6 million.

The average Obamacare premium is up a hair compared to last year:

Did you know that the Philadelphia Fed tracks something called the Partisan Conflict Index every month? They do. Here's what it looks like over the past couple of decades:

The spikes and one valley (for COVID) seem reasonable, but there's an odd upturn in early 2010. It's not a spike, it's a permanent increase. What caused it?

Two big things happened around then: Congress approved Obamacare and the Supreme Court opened the floodgates of corporate campaign contributions in Citizens United. Did one or both of these things usher in an era of permanently higher political conflict? Are there any other reasonable suspects?

(Alternatively, maybe this is a spike, and the permanent increase comes shortly afterward following the 2010 midterm election. Hmmm.)

As you might guess, the index is built on a computerized analysis of newspaper archives, which might or might not be reliable. In any case, the creator of the index has calculated it going back more than a century:

Generally speaking, the index shows low levels of conflict all the way from the 1920s through the 1960s. Then, almost precisely in 1970, it starts to shoot up. Things stabilize a bit in the 1980s and '90s and then begin to surge again around 2000.

I figure the surge in 2000 is likely due to the expansion of Fox News. But the 1970 surge? I'm befuddled by that one. It begins pre-Watergate and continues well after our withdrawal from Vietnam. What was it about the 1970s that caused a huge increase in partisan conflict? Ideas?

I've mentioned before that Donald Trump has been remarkably successful at making people fear him. Partly this is because he's focused his attention on things where he has a lot of discretion. I'm not talking about the dumb little stuff like tax on tips, which is never going to happen, but on the big ticket items he seems dead serious about.

Trump has promised, for example, to deport millions of illegal immigrants, and he wields sole executive authority to direct how that happens. If you're not a Trump supporter, you might end up at the top of the list for an ICE raid of your farm or sweatshop.

Tariffs always produce lots of requests for exemptions, many of them from companies that will literally go out of business if they don't get one. And if you don't support Trump you probably won't.

Do you want to drill for oil or gas on federal lands? The president has authority to decide which fields are opened up. If you don't play ball, yours might stay untapped for the duration.

Trump wants to reschedule thousands of civil service workers as political appointees who can be retained or fired at will. It goes without saying that your chances of staying on are considerably greater if you bend the knee.

What these all have in common is that Trump is serious about them and he controls them personally, with no need for pesky congressional approval. Is it any wonder that so many people are afraid of him?

This is the Donnerbrunnen in Vienna. The name doesn't have any special meaning: it's a fountain designed by a guy named Donner. This one is a copy that sits in the newly finished pedestrian zone in the Neuer Markt. The original is in the Belvedere Museum.

Today the Washington Post profiles New Castle, Pennsylvania, a desperately poor town where a quarter of all families live in poverty. But most of them voted for Donald Trump anyway even though they depend on welfare benefits that Republicans have long wanted to cut back. Some quotes:

Lori Mosura: “He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” Mosura, 55, said on a recent afternoon. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.”

Steve Tillia: “It’s not cutting government programs, it’s cutting the amount of people needed to run a program,” he said. “They are cutting staff, which could actually increase the amount of the programs that we get.”

Dawn Simmons: Trump’s decisions may even lead to enhanced benefits in the coming years because he plans to “put Americans first.”

Kathy Davis: Asked whether she worries that Trump’s agenda could hurt the poor, Davis said the incoming president is “too smart for that. You can’t wipe out half of the population” of New Castle, Davis said. “We are old and tired and just want to be taken care of, and Trump has too much common sense, so I don’t think he is going to do anything to hurt us.”

The delusion here is painful. It's on Democrats that so many people have apparently given up on them, but I still wonder what they could have done. Joe Biden increased food stamp benefits permanently by nearly $200 after inflation. He cut the poverty rate from Trump's first-term average of 11.1% to 10.1% in 2023. He made Obamacare cheaper for everyone. Even after the recent unwinding, he's expanded the Medicaid rolls by 8.3 million. SSI benefits went up 22%—more than inflation. He wrote generous stimulus checks at the height of the pandemic against united Republican opposition.

But as near as I can tell, the SNAP increase is practically a state secret. The stimulus checks didn't have Biden's signature on them. And the child tax credit and other pandemic lifelines went away after the pandemic was over. So lots of poor people think Democrats did nothing for them.

Part of the reason for this is that Democrats are reluctant to tout their safety net accomplishments because they're afraid it will turn off working class voters. They might be right. But it sure hits them in the gut when even the beneficiaries of their programs don't believe they've gotten anything from them.