Author: Kevin Drum

Can someone tell me what's going on with this headline in the Washington Post today?

This turns out to be a routine kind of story we've all read a dozen times. It's about a feud between neighbors that spirals out of control and becomes completely insane. What it's not about is the fact that one of the neighbors is gay. There is almost nothing in the text of the piece that even mentions this, and nothing at all to suggest it has anything to do with the source of the bad blood.

So why highlight it?

It's natural for Republicans to dislike the Democratic agenda and vice versa. But check out these Republican quotes from a Wall Street Journal story today:

“It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are.”...If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.”

“We have lost our K-12 schools to radical-left activists. We’ve certainly lost our universities to the same, and other institutions. Everyday Americans,” are being forced “to bend your knee to the rainbow flag.”

“Our base believes that we’re losing our country, and that the left has become radicalized to a point that they no longer believe in America and want to burn it all down and remake it in their image.”

About 80% of Republicans believe that the Democratic agenda, “if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.”

"Downfall." "Bend your knee." "Burn it all down." "Destroy America." The apocalyptic language is what makes things so toxic these days. If you truly believe that Democrats deliberately want to destroy America, what wouldn't you do or believe to defeat them?

I'm hesitant to post this chart, because it comes from a source I'm unfamiliar with and don't know if I can trust. But it seems both interesting and plausible. Zach Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute combined the answers to a whole slew of mental hygiene questions into a single index of teen mental health, and this is what he got:

We've seen similar results before. For some reason, around 2012 teen mental health suddenly plummets (a higher score means worse mental health). And it plummets more for lefty teens than for conservative teens.

Based on the evidence I've seen, I don't believe this is due to social media. Maybe a little bit, but the best research simply doesn't demonstrate that social media plays a big role in teen angst, or that its role is more than strictly limited.

So either this is a statistical artifact, which seems less likely the more we see it, or something else is going on. But what?

Catherine Rampell says that if we achieve the coveted economic soft landing, it won't be because of anything radical we did:

It will be because of boring, standard economic textbook fixes for inflation: i.e., supply shocks subsiding, fiscal support fading and, most controversially, interest rates rising.

The Federal Reserve’s 10 rate hikes since March 2022 seem to have dampened consumer demand and brought it more in line with constrained supply — just as traditional economic theory would predict.

This is true as far as it goes. Consumer spending has indeed been flat since the start of the year. But there's more to spending than just consumers; there's also government spending. If you add the two together, it looks like this:

Total spending has continued to rise over the past year and is right on its pre-pandemic trend. On the other hand, here is gross domestic investment:

Domestic investment has fallen 7% since 2022, though it's only barely gotten recently below its pre-pandemic trend. That said, you'd expect interest rate hikes to affect investment before spending, and that's exactly what's happened.

Take these two together and it looks as if the Fed's policy actions have had only a very modest impact on the economy so far. That impact may well increase in the second half of this year.

I never expected to get dragged down the rabbit hole yet again of Mississippi's "reading miracle," but I have no choice. It looks like I might have been wrong again. Sigh.

Let's recap: In 2013 Mississippi passed a new law that focused on teaching phonics in elementary school. The results were impressive. After the law passed, Mississippi went from well below the national average in reading to well above it in 2022. In all, their kids have gained about 1-1½ grade levels over the past decade.

But Mississippi also did something else: they put in place tough retention policies for third-graders. Those who don't pass a reading test at the end of the year are held back. About 10% of the class is retained each year.

The problem is that this has a mechanical effect on 4th grade reading scores. If you take a 4th grade class and eliminate the bottom 10% (by holding them back), the remaining average will be higher than it should be. When you account for this, it turns out Mississippi made no gains at all. Just the opposite. There's no Mississippi Miracle after all.

We're now up to date with our story. But I've gotten some plausible pushback from researchers who say that Mississippi has always held back lots of kids. In practice, the 2013 law didn't change anything.

This is where things get very subtle, so pay close attention. It turns out 4th-grade classes aren't just missing the 10% of weak students who are held back. What they're getting is 90% normal students plus 10% who were held back the previous year and are now finally being advanced to fourth grade.

But is this new and has to be accounted for, or has it been happening all along and nothing really changed in 2013?

The answer lies in a subtle analysis of age, courtesy of the boffins at the Urban Institute. Students who are held back and then advanced are a year older than the normal fourth graders. Overall, this means the average age of the class will be 0.1 years older than normal. So do we see this jump in age after the 2013 reforms? We do not:

In 2017, the average age of a fourth grade class is a minuscule 0.01 higher than the 1998-2013 average. That's no difference at all. This proxy is strong evidence that Mississippi's retention policies never changed in practice, which means it's entirely kosher to just compare their scores normally before and after reform.

And by that measure we're back to where we started: Something really did happen in Mississippi. After the switch to phonics, their kids could read a lot better than before.

Just sayin':

I know that some of you think I'm crazy for constantly adjusting everything in the world for inflation, but with rare exceptions it's always the right thing to do. Even for the stock market. If it's going up but not even beating inflation, then it's not really doing that great, is it?

Anyway, the S&P 500 is supposed to grow by some percentage every year, which means it should show exponential growth. But if you take its pre-pandemic performance and then fit an exponential trendline to it, it hasn't even recovered to its boring old trend. Some bull market.

Remember that lunatic judge last week who decided the federal government was censoring right-wing views and banned them from talking to social media? His order was appealed and today the 5th Circuit issued, with no comment, an emergency stay. Routine cooperation about election security and other issues can now resume.

Although the 5th Circuit is notoriously conservative, the feds got a bit of a break in the random three-judge panel that heard the appeal. But this is far from the last word. A different three-judge panel will hear arguments on the merits in an expedited hearing, and after that there's always the possibility of appeal to the Supreme Court. For now, though, sanity reigns once again.

Moms for Liberty is a group of Republican women whose goal is to elect conservatives to school boards around the country. This is nothing new. Republican women did the same thing in the early '60s to fight communism in schools; again in the '80s after Anita Bryant inspired the Moral Majority to fight gays in school; then yet again in the early '90s to elect more conservative Christians to school boards. This is now at least their fourth go-around. Here is Robert Pondiscio in The Free Press:

Moms for Liberty is Teach For America’s dark opposite number. They won’t be talked out of their conviction that malign forces in public schools—gender ideology, critical race theory, Marxism, anti-Americanism—have come for their children, and they’re having exactly none of it.

....The group attracts and frequently abides a lunatic fringe, fueling its critics’ counternarrative that the movement is intolerant, racist even....Members of a local Tennessee chapter last year, for example, sued to remove an outstanding English curriculum, Wit & Wisdom, from their school district, on the grounds that its elementary school texts about civil rights icons Ruby Bridges and Martin Luther King Jr. are too dark and disturbing for children and violate state laws against teaching critical race theory. A New Hampshire chapter offered a $500 bounty “for the person that first successfully catches a public school teacher breaking this [state’s anti-critical race theory] law.” An Arkansas Mom was banned from school grounds after an audio recording captured her saying “if I had any mental issues, [school employees] would all be plowed down by a freaking gun right now.”

Neither are the group’s fanatical elements limited only to local chapters. On Saturday morning at the conference, Moms for Liberty fixture James Lindsay painted a picture of the organization as “war moms” fighting a “Maoist cultural revolution” engineered at the highest levels of government and elite institutions. When Mao came to power, Lindsay claimed, his first step was to close schools and reeducate teachers. “They shut down the schools for two years and came back with a whole new program. Does that sound familiar?”

This is fairly remarkable stuff coming from a basically sympathetic author. But Moms for Liberty is not some kind of brand new force never seen before among conservative women. It's all from a familiar playbook that reappears every decade or two when they suddenly decide that public schools have become too liberal and something must be done. And the result is always the same: a small group of fanatics are tolerated and eventually become the de facto leaders of the movement, inspiring the others with ominous, paranoid tales of what's really going on in their children's classes.

Moms for Liberty is walking a well-trodden path. They will, unfortunately, succeed, just like all the school movements before them. However, they will also fade out within a few years, just like all the school movements before them. Their Achilles heel isn't just fanaticism, it's lack of staying power.

Here are Hilbert and a watchful rabbit relaxing in the shade of the front porch. Hilbert likes to come out here so he can keep an eye on the world (from a safe distance).

One of the things that's helped bring inflation down is a sustained drop in the cost of imports. Take a look at the latest figures:

Starting in February, the supply chain pressure index went negative, indicating that supply chain issues were all but gone. At the same time, imports became deflationary. They didn't just flatten: stuff from overseas costs less today than it did a year ago. Import prices in June were 6.1% lower than last year, and even core imports were 1.5% lower.

And this has all happened without an especially strong dollar to help it along. What's happened is simple: when production cratered during the pandemic, supply declined and imports therefore cost more. Once everything recovered, however, there was no reason to think that goods would stay at high prices. Instead, with supply restored to normal, prices are falling back to their old levels.

This is different from what happens during a monetary inflation: Even when the inflationary episode ends, there's still way more money sloshing around in the system and prices remain at high levels. They just stop going up.

This is yet more evidence, as if any more were needed, that pandemic inflation was not normal inflation. It was not the '70s; it wasn't even the '50s. It was purely artificial, caused by a virus that killed off supply along with fiscal stimulus that maintained demand. When the virus and the stimulus went away, so did inflation.