Author: Kevin Drum

This is from a research letter in JAMA today:

Average temperatures in the US have gone up 2°F since 2000. That might not seem like much, but when the average increases a little the tail of the bell curve increases a lot. In the past decade, that small increase in average temps has caused the number of extreme heat waves to increase by upwards of 3x. Thus the very large increase in heat-related deaths.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

Why Philadelphia Is Bucking a Nationwide Surge in Evictions

In a nutshell, Philadelphia's success is chalked up to its mandatory eviction diversion program: "After a trial period [starting in 2020], the city in June made it a permanent requirement for landlords to go through out-of-court negotiations with tenants before they can sue to remove them."

The Journal uses data from the Eviction Lab, which got me curious about evictions in general. It turns out Philadelphia isn't the top performer:

Philadelphia is down 41% compared to before the pandemic but New York City is even better, with a decline of 48%. So what's their secret? Here is eviction nationwide:

Evictions never turned into a crisis. After the pandemic they reverted to their normal rate and have declined by about a quarter over the past year.

As an aside, I have some doubts about the Eviction Lab data. They show Maryland as the eviction capital of the country—which might be true—but their most recent data includes things like 98.8 eviction filings per hundred renters in Baltimore County. It doesn't seem especially likely that landlords literally tried to evict everyone, which prompts me to have some doubts about the rest of their data. Caveat emptor.

This is the shoe fence near Rice, California. It was initially a shoe tree of obscure origin, where travelers would hang pairs of shoes, but the tree burned down in 2003 and was replaced by a "shoe garden." It's a garden only in the loosest sense of the word: a bare patch of ground about a hundred feet square surrounded by fencing. This allows the tradition to continue, and apparently also serves as a roadside memorial to someone named Dominick who died last year. The bottom photo shows the "garden" from the inside.

Yesterday I happened to come across a tweet about how we were all so crushed by work these days that we had no time to cook meals etc. Is this true? Here's some data on how many hours employed people work each day:

Over the past two decades, the number of people holding down multiple jobs has declined, and the number of hours worked each day has increased about four minutes.

In other words, not a lot has happened. We work almost exactly as much as we did 20 years ago, and holding down multiple jobs is also almost exactly the same as 20 years ago (though down on a trend basis).

There are other issues, of course, like employers who screw with their workers by refusing to set a schedule each week, or requiring them to close up one day and then open up the next. And I don't know how these numbers look if you bin them by income level. Still, in the most general sense, the work environment today for must of us hasn't changed in at least two decades.

This is pretty damn impressive:

Over the course of five years, obese people in the control group had a 3.5% chance of dying. Similar people in the group that took GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) had only a 0.75% chance of dying.

What's more they found that the GLP-1 group had lower risk of ischemic heart disease, heart failure, arrhythmias, hypertension, stroke, atrial fibrillation, acute kidney injury, and allergic reactions.

They're going to start putting this stuff in the water supply before long.

The Wall Street Journal says today that plug-in hybrids are finally getting popular. Let's check on that:

If you stop right at March and squint a bit, as the Journal does, it might look like plug-in hybrids are doing a little better than EVs. But why cherry pick? We have figures through last month, and it's pretty obvious that plug-in hybrids had only a fleeting few months of success. Since the start of 2022, plug-in hybrid sales have increased 86% compared to 135% for full EVs. Over the past year, sales are down 4% compared to flat for EVs.

Come on, folks. Stop writing trend stories that aren't backed up by reality.

If you're interested in such things, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld wrote a few days ago in the New York Times about a writing competition with ChatGPT. Based on reader input, she chose a few themes (lust, regret, kissing) and details (middle-aged protagonist, flip-flops) and then set out to write a short story. A Times editor worked with ChatGPT to write a competing story.

As it happens, I was pretty sure I could tell which was which, and I was right. Oddly, there were two things that stood out to me. The first is obvious: the Sittenfeld story included odd, unexpected quirks that made it lively, while the ChatGPT story was sort of dull and predictable. But the second reason is that the Sittenfeld story felt awkward in places and made me want to break out my blue pencil. The prose in the ChatGPT story was merely workmanlike but hardly ever seemed objectionable. Sittenfeld basically agrees:

Overall I found it to be proficient on a sentence level but clichéd, and also shallow in sentiment. To me, there’s just something missing — like the literary equivalent of fat-free cookies or a Ken doll’s genitals.

Of course, one might say it's remarkable that ChatGPT could even come close to the level of an accomplished real writer. It's also fair to point out that ChatGPT is very sensitive to its prompts. A different editor that offered different prompts and iterated a few times might have produced something better.

And, as Sittenfeld acknowledges, there's another big difference: she took a couple of weeks to write her story and then had to spend more time paring it down to 1,000 words (the agreed length). ChatGPT wrote its story in 17 seconds and hit the length requirement right on target.

For now, this experiment shows that AI still isn't close to the best humans in creative fields. But it also shows that AI isn't all that far behind. Bewarned.

Here's an interesting tidbit you might not know: who is the least warlike recent US president? In the following list you get one point added for each war you started and one point subtracted for ending someone else's war. I've included only sizeable wars that featured either American boots on the ground or substantial air activity. If it was just occasional drones or missiles or a few dozen advisors, it doesn't count. Here's the scorecard:

• Reagan: +2 (Lebanon, Grenada).
• Bush: +3 (Panama, Iraq, Somalia).
• Clinton: +2 (Bosnia, Haiti, ended Somalia, Kosovo).
• Bush: +3 (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia).
• Obama: +2 (ended Iraq war, Libya, Niger, ISIS).
• Trump: -1 (ended ISIS).
• Biden: -3 (ended Afghanistan, ended drone strikes, ended Niger).

This doesn't paint the whole picture, of course. Some wars are bigger than others. Some are multilateral. And events are different from administration to administration.

All that said, however, George W. Bush was our most interventionist president. He's technically tied with his father but his wars were considerably bigger and longer-lasting. Joe Biden has been by far the least interventionist president of our lifetimes.

Be careful with these micro-summaries that are ubiquitous on Twitter:

In fact, Vance explicitly agreed that tariffs can raise prices. But he says that's offset by job gains:

It causes this dynamic effect where more jobs come into the country. Anything that you lose on the tariff from the perspective of the consumer you gain in higher wages, so you're ultimately much better off. You have more take home pay, you have better jobs.

This is a more sophisticated argument in favor of tariffs, but as it happens, it's just as wrong. Economists are pretty unanimous about the basic shape of things: tariffs can increase employment in the industries that get protection, but this is offset by decreases in other industries and by retaliatory tariffs. The net effect on jobs is almost always negative. Here's a sampling of research results:

• Joint Economic Committee: "Research shows that tariffs eliminate more jobs than they create."
• Tax Foundation: "We estimate [Trump's] proposed tariffs would reduce...hours worked by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs."
• Autor et al.: "The net effect of import tariffs, retaliatory tariffs, and farm subsidies on employment in locations exposed to the trade war was at best a wash, and it may have been mildly negative."
• World Bank: "US tariffs and retaliatory tariffs had negative impacts on job postings. In contrast, the protectionist impact of tariffs on US jobs is indistinguishable from zero."
• New York Fed: "Given the history of protecting industries with import tariffs, we can conclude that the 25 percent steel tariff is likely to cost more jobs than it saves."
• Brookings: "When economists have attempted to add up the net effect of Trump’s tariffs on jobs, any gains in importing-competing sectors appear to have been more than offset by losses in industries that use imported inputs and face retaliation on their foreign exports."
• Federal Reserve: "Our results indicate that tariffs have been a drag on employment and have failed to increase output.... For manufacturing employment, a small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs."

This is all in addition to a unanimous consensus that tariffs reduce GDP and cause significantly higher prices for consumers:

The absolute best you can say about Trump's tariffs is that (a) they will be a huge tax on US consumers, (b) they will slow economic growth, and (c) maybe, just maybe, they'll have no impact on jobs. But most likely they'll reduce employment too.

This is maybe not the smoothest translation ever, but apparently Israel has launched a massive preemptive attack on Hezbollah along Lebanon's southern border:

Presumably the planned Hezbollah operation was the long-awaited Iranian retribution for Israel's recent assassinations. Hezbollah has well over 100,000 rockets in its arsenal, so this could end up as a very long, very destructive expansion of the war.