Author: Kevin Drum

Are you curious about whether Democrats really are a party of childless cat ladies? We know that both women and cat owners are more likely to be Democrats, but how about childless people? Here you go:

Childlessness has gone way up among Democrats over the past three decades while it's gone down among Republicans. I'm pretty sure this is mostly because of declining religiosity among Dems and rising religiosity among Republicans, but I don't have access to the data in order to control for that and find out.

Whatever the reason, Democrats and Republicans used to have about the same number of kids, but that started to change in 2000 and the gap is now pretty big.

LA Times columnist Anita Chabria ponders what Donald Trump was really up to in his disastrous interview with Black journalists yesterday:

Trump offended his Black audience. Mistake or part of the plan?

At best, Trump was grabbing headlines that in recent days have slipped out of his grasp.... At worst, the whole thing was meant to show off to his base, proving “he is willing and able to stand up to Black people and to make a case that he is the same person wherever he goes.”

Trump knows perfectly well how to pander to a crowd—just listen to his comments a few days ago to a Christian audience—so it's only natural to wonder if he was being deliberately insulting in front of a Black audience.

Who knows, really? The mind of Trump is a dark and chaotic place. But I'd bet against it. I think this was just another example of Trump being unable to control himself when the pressure gets too high. He has nothing to prove to his base, after all, and in his disordered imagination he really and truly can't figure out why Black people might not like him. To him, it makes perfect sense that a Black audience would eat up his insinuation that Kamala Harris isn't really Black and therefore doesn't deserve their support. This is the same genre of imbecilic attack that works great in a Republican primary, for example, so why not here? He doesn't understand that stuff this stupid only works when you're among fans who mindlessly lap up everything you say.

As for calling the interviewers nasty, that's also something that works great for Trump when he's among friends. He doesn't realize that it sounds defensive and idiotic to anyone else.

So, no, I don't think this was deliberate provocation on Trump's part. He truly believes he deserves the Black vote because he thinks he deserves everyone's vote. That's what happens when you lose touch with reality.

This is a gigantic moth at the Schmetterling Haus in Vienna. It's appropriately called an Atlas moth, and it's too bad there's no obvious scale to see how big it is. From wingtip to wingtip I'd put it at nearly a foot.

It's also a very lazy moth. It might as well have been a statue for all the movement I saw out of it during a half hour visit.

Labor productivity in Q2 was up 2.7% compared to last year, which is a nice reading. That's four consecutive quarters of productivity growth well over 2%.

But just to give you some perspective, here's labor productivity over the past three decades:

As you can see, after a brief (and artificial) spurt during the pandemic, we're now back at the pre-pandemic trendline of 1.3% average annual growth. That's half the 2.7% annual growth of 1996-2007.

That earlier period of high productivity growth is usually chalked up to businesses finally integrating PCs and LANs into their operations in a deep way, especially for logistics and other back-office tasks. In the past decade or so, growth has been slower because we still haven't really integrated the internet into business operations and we're not even close to integrating AI. Presumably that will come and eventually productivity will start to rise.

Which is good economic news but not necessarily such great news for workers, since it will probably be due to AI taking over jobs. Time will tell.

Construction spending fell in June for the second month in a row:

This is hardly cause for panic, but it's the first time construction spending has fallen two months in a row since the end of 2022. It's the first time commercial construction has fallen two months in a row since 2021.

It turns out all the rumors were true:

The United States, Russia, Germany and four other countries swapped at least two dozen people Thursday in the largest prisoner exchange since the height of the Cold War. Those released included American journalist Evan Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan, Russian dissidents and others from the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, Russia and Belarus.

It's funny. I went looking for news about this last night and there was nothing. I don't know if that's because no one had dug up anything new at the time or if the government had asked news organizations to keep quiet while they were working out final details.

Raj Chetty and a cast of thousands have a new paper out that looks at economic mobility. In a nutshell, it finds that mobility has increased among Black families and decreased among white families. Similarly, it has increased among the rich and declined among the poor. For more details, the New York Times has a long write-up here.

But I was sort of intrigued by this chart:

Children from higher-income families tend to have higher employment rates. This probably doesn't seem too surprising. But at the 90th percentile—that is, household income above $250,000—the trend breaks down. Kids from the very richest households work a little less than those who were merely well off.

The difference is only a few percentage points. Still, what's the cause? The most obvious possibility is that rich kids are more likely to get by on family wealth (or inheritance) and don't have to work. But while that seems plausible at very high income levels, it seems a little unlikely at $250,000.

But what other explanations are there? I'm coming up blank.

Here's the latest YouGov poll on the presidential race along with all the crosstabs:

Kamala Harris is leading Trump 46% to 44%. Compared to two weeks ago, she's five points ahead of where Biden was and seven points ahead of where she was.

Compared to Biden two weeks ago, Harris has picked up 3 points among whites, 7 points among Blacks, and 7 points among Hispanics. She's also gained among all age groups, including a solid 11-point gain among young voters.

Harris has also gained a spectacular 10 points among independents, and she's polling higher with Democrats than Biden did. The undecided/third-party vote has plummeted by 7 points since she entered the race.

The YouGov poll generally changes slowly thanks to its structure, so these are big gains. And while it's true that Harris's honeymoon with the public won't last forever, I think these gains are permanent and will only get bigger. There are just a whole lot of people who breathed a huge sigh of relief when Biden withdrew. They really didn't want to vote for Trump, and all they were looking for was someone, anyone, who seemed like a reasonable alternative. Harris is that person.

If Donald Trump wants to lose the "weird" label, he needs to stop being.......not so much weird in this clip as just plain creepy:

"She was always of Indian heritage ... until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black." What kind of person talks like this? A five-year-old knows better.

Kamala Harris went to Howard University. In the '90s she was famously the girlfriend of California Speaker Willie Brown. Here's the lead from a San Francisco Chronicle article in 2004 about her first political victory:

Kamala Harris was sworn in Thursday as the first black woman in California history to serve as a district attorney, pledging to be "smart on crime" as she assumes the role of San Francisco's top prosecutor.

Harris's ancestry, as everyone knows, is Black on her father's side and Indian on her mother's side. This isn't hard. But Trump blundered ahead obliviously, suggesting that she only recently adopted a fake Black identity for political advantage. And even more incredibly, he seemed to think this might be a great ploy in front of a Black audience. Was he expecting them to nod appreciatively and murmur, "Hell yeah, man's got a point"?

Whatever else you can say, Trump sure as hell didn't win any Asian or Black votes today. Why did he agree to an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in the first place if he planned to be hostile and condescending the whole time?

Traffic jam on the Danube.