Author: Kevin Drum

Donald Trump might be stuck in court for the next few weeks, but that doesn't mean there's no good news on the horizon. On Tuesday, after the closing bell on Wall Street, he will qualify to receive another 36 million shares of his social media company. Hooray!

Here's the thing to watch. All those additional shares dilute the stock: there will be 172 million shares outstanding instead of 136 million. Under normal circumstances, this would mechanically reduce the share price by 21%. But will it? Or will the poor suckers who own the stock just merrily ignore this and keep the share price where it is?

Who knows? This whole billion-dollar scam is already so far into bizarro land that it's impossible to know what will happen next. It's unfathomable that somehow the whole thing is legal.

Big news today: San Francisco's $1.7 million bathroom finally opened and it ended up costing only about $700,000. What's more, the toilet itself is a prefab unit that was donated by a Nevada company, so the city's net cost clocked in at only $200-300,000.

And it's a good thing it was donated. Nevada is one of 22 states that San Francisco refuses to do business with because of its inadequate abortion and LGBTQ+ policies. However, apparently San Francisco doesn't object so much that it won't accept a gift from Nevada. So everything worked out.

Do pro-Palestinian protesters support Hamas? Probably most of them don't, but the language they routinely use leaves room for doubt. This is from Students for Justice in Palestine:

Settlers are not “civilians” in the sense of international law.... Resistance comes in all forms—armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations.

"Resistance" includes armed struggle and Israelis are not civilians. There may not be any explicit mention of Hamas here, but this is pretty obviously a defense of Hamas slaughtering civilians on October 7. In other places "the resistance" is used as a synonym for Hamas.

Avoiding explicit references to Hamas is plainly political. Jodi Dean, who was famously suspended from Hobart and William Smith Colleges for her "comments" on the Gaza war, is more explicit:

The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating.... Although imperialist and Zionist forces try to condense the action into a singular figure of Hamas terrorism...the will to fight for Palestinian freedom precedes and exceeds it.

These are the paragliders who sailed into Israel and butchered more than a thousand civilians, including hundreds of kids at the Re'im music festival. This was "exhilarating."

The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas. Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left. One might have expected that the left in the imperial core [i.e., the United States] would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine.

In other words, American lefties feel like they "have to" condemn Hamas to maintain their credibility. But Dean is having none of it:

Defending Hamas, we take the side of the Palestinian resistance.... Which side are you on? Liberation or Zionism and imperialism? There are two sides and no alternative, no negotiation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed.

That's clear enough. It's worth noting that even after writing such an explicit defense of killing civilians, Dean's suspension was condemned by nearly everybody as a breach of academic freedom. Maybe that's correct. But after reading her entire essay, I have to wonder whether she can be trusted to treat all her students fairly and maintain an evenhanded approach in her lectures.

It's wise for most Palestinian resistance groups in the US to avoid being as clear as Dean. After all, most Americans, no matter whose side they're on, still think of Hamas as a brutal terrorist group. But even though the resistance groups try to keep things fuzzy, there's not much question that most of them think Hamas is just doing what has to be done and October 7 is therefore to be celebrated. After all, it was nothing more than a necessary step toward eliminating the settler colonialist Israelis once and for all.

POSTSCRIPT: And what about Israeli killing of civilians in Gaza? Is that just a necessary step toward eliminating Hamas? There are many who think so. I'm not one of them, but it's sophistry nonetheless to pretend these are the same things. Hamas invaded Israel for the express purpose of slaughtering civilians. Israel may be guilty of not caring enough about civilian deaths in Gaza, but they are fundamentally fighting against a terrorist group which has the announced aim of destroying Israel.

This is not some mushy, hair-splitting distinction that's blind to Israeli behavior. It's fundamental to the most minimal conception of human decency.

It's common knowledge that, on average, educated people live longer than less-educated people. But now a team of researchers says that even if you yourself are a high school dropout, you can reduce your chance of dying merely by living in a neighborhood with lots of educated people:

There are several reasons this might be true:

• Educated neighborhoods have better access to health care.
• Educated neighborhoods have less air pollution.
• Educated neighborhoods have less crime.
• Healthy people are more likely to move into educated neighborhoods.

None of these turn out to be the case. They have only a slight influence on mortality.

It turns out nearly the entire effect is due to two things: less smoking and less obesity. Of these, smoking has by far the biggest impact. The authors suggest two reasons for this: (a) highly educated areas are more likely to support things like smoking bans in the workplace, and (b) they have stronger social norms against smoking.

More educated areas may be more likely to support legislation and regulations aimed at improving health. For example, this may include tobacco control policies such as tobacco taxes, clean indoor air laws, and workplace smoking bans.

....A second theory is that area human capital drives peer effects, leading to the development of different social norms in high and low human capital areas. For instance, the proximity of more educated individuals undertaking healthy behaviors may encourage individuals across the education distribution to undertake healthy behaviors themselves.

The moral is clear: if you want to live a long time, don't smoke and don't get too overweight. But I suppose you already knew that.

Today I have a mystery chart for you. Take a look at it:

What do you see here? Obviously the trend changes around 2022, but when exactly would you say it changes? The beginning of 2022? The middle? Towards the end?

My take is pretty simple: the trendline quite obviously starts to jump right at the start of 2022. Then, maybe around August or September, it levels out and once again continues rising at its old rate.

Now let's take down the curtain and show you the exact same chart, but this time as presented in a recent study, "Changes in Permanent Contraception Procedures Among Young Adults Following the Dobbs Decision":

The authors use an interrupted time series to demonstrate that women got their tubes tied more often in the wake of the Dobbs decision. But this is why I hate interrupted time series: they're abused way too often. The authors certainly show that the number of tubal ligations is higher in 2023 than in 2021, but they don't show that the increase started after the Dobbs decision. In fact, it quite clearly started many months before.

So what really happened? That's still a mystery. There's no obvious reason I can think of for more tubal ligations starting in January 2022. It's especially mysterious because the authors also look at vasectomies, and it really does look like those increased right after Dobbs:

Even here I'm skeptical. The rate of vasectomies jumped in a single month, literally within weeks of the Dobbs decision. That's not impossible, but it sure seems like a remarkably quick response. Can you even schedule a vasectomy in less than a month?

At the moment, your guess about this is as good as mine. But if Dobbs really did cause more women to opt for permanent birth control, I'd expect to see a change a few months after the decision was handed down. Maybe around September 2022 at the earliest. In any case, I certainly wouldn't expect to see a sharp increase six months before it was handed down and four months before it was leaked.

This is the last of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. It's called Spruce Tree House because.......those are spruce trees nearby? All of these dwellings, by the way, were built in the 1200s after Puebloans had been driven from their previous homes by a long and destructive drought in the 1100s.

I smell a PhD dissertation in the works! But start collecting your data now.

Here in the People's Republic of California we like to keep things fair. And two of our legislators have had enough:

A pair of Orange County state senators from opposing parties — who frequently fly between their districts and Sacramento — are both boosting a first-in-the-nation proposal critics say would ban the expedited security screening company CLEAR from state airports.

“The least you can expect when you have to go through the security line at the airport is that you don’t suffer the indignity of somebody pushing you out of the way to let the rich person pass you,” Josh Newman, the Democratic lawmaker who authored the bill, told POLITICO.

The bill would force CLEAR to have its own security lanes or else get out of town. The problem, you see, is not that the affluent get perks. It's OK as long as they're discreet. The problem arises when their perks are a little too obvious, and in the case of CLEAR they could hardly be more annoying if they tried. It's no surprise that ordinary working schmoes get exasperated when a CLEAR agent comes by yelling "make way" while escorting some rich guy past everyone else in line.

So get your own lane, rich people! Come on.

POSTSCRIPT: There's actually something a little odd about this. I don't travel a lot anymore, but I do travel some, and my experience has been that TSA lines aren't really very long these days. I'm usually through in five or ten minutes.

Now, it's true that most of the time I travel during off-peak hours, so that might make a difference. What's been your experience?

As you know, I've spent a long time arguing that the Fed's interest rate hikes aren't responsible for lower inflation. This is because inflation started to ebb within a few months of the hikes, and that's way too fast. It takes a year or two for interest rate changes to affect inflation.

Well, it's been a couple of years now, so where does that leave me? Still puzzled. You see, interest rates don't affect inflation magically. They slow down the economy by making loans more expensive, and a slower economy then brings down inflation. But that never happened. The economy never slowed down:

Average GDP growth since the interest rate hikes began has been about 3.0%. That's more than it was before the pandemic, which was a pretty strong growth era itself.

So what happened? This was well after stimulus spending had mostly dried up and wasn't affecting anything. So how is it that a large and sharp increase in interest rates didn't slow down the economy? Does anyone know?

I have a potentially stupid question to ask about this. I mentioned a few months ago that the Fed no longer controls interest rates via open market operations—that is, by buying and selling treasury bonds on the open market. Instead, it's mostly switched to the much easier method of changing the rate it pays banks for the reserves they keep at the Fed. If the Fed is paying 5.25%, no bank will loan out money for less, so interest rates automatically go up.

But is it possible that high interest rates have a different effect depending on how they're created? In other words, maybe higher interest rates without any open market operations behind them have an attenuated effect on the economy.

That sounds kind of stupid, but there's got to be something going on. More prosaically, maybe the fed hikes were just too small to have much of an effect. It was only a year ago that real interest rates went above zero, and even now real rates are only about 2%. In the past it's taken real rates of around 4% to touch off a recession.

Either way, it's hard to believe that no one really knows what's going on. How is it that the Fed hiked rates and produced not a soft landing, but no landing at all?

Test your knowledge:

Q: How long does it take the FDA to approve new drugs?

A: About seven or eight months on average.

No, no, wait. It takes years. Everyone says it takes years. What nonsense is this?

It's not nonsense. Once a New Drug Application is submitted, the FDA typically turns it around in a few months. What's more, studies have repeatedly shown that the FDA is generally faster than European, Canadian, and most other regulatory agencies around the world. They also approve more drugs than the other agencies.

What does take a long time is clinical trials. The entire process of discovery and testing of new molecules takes anywhere from 10-15 years:

So if you want to speed up new drug approvals, the place to focus is not the relatively short final stage but the tortuous clinical trial stage. Here's an estimate of how many drugs make it through the various development steps:

Lots of people complain about the FDA being too slow, and in some cases there's something to this.¹ But the FDA is careful for a reason: although you may not hear about it a lot, most drugs are failures. As the chart above shows, fewer than 10% of all candidate drugs end up making it through the entire gauntlet. The rest either don't work or turn out to be unsafe. The only reason we know this is because the testing regimen is so strict.

But there's one stage where almost everything makes it through: Phase 1 trials. This prompts me to wonder why we bother with it. Why not combine Phase 1 and Phase 2 and cut a couple of years out of the whole cycle?

I'm sure there's a good reason not to do this, but I can't figure out what it might be. I suppose that's because the answer is so obvious that no one ever bothers asking the question. But I'm asking. Why bother with a step that almost never uncovers serious problems?

¹This is probably more true for medical devices than drugs, but there are certainly cases of drugs that have taken longer to approve than they should have.

UPDATE: The answer appears to be pretty simple. Phase 1 trials are done on healthy volunteers to check for safety. Only if healthy patients can tolerate the drug is it given to sick people in the Phase 2 trial.