Author: Kevin Drum

Elon Musk was in Washington DC last night to—

Well, it's not clear exactly what he was there to do. The Washington Post explains:

“Just met with Speaker McCarthy & Rep Jeffries to discuss ensuring that this platform is fair to both parties,” Musk tweeted Thursday evening.

....It remains unclear whether the main purpose of Musk’s visit was to meet with McCarthy alone. An aide to Jeffries told The Washington Post that the Democratic leader and Musk had only a coincidental encounter as the billionaire was leaving his meeting with McCarthy.

It sounds like Musk was actually at the Capitol to meet with Kevin McCarthy to discuss how Twitter could avoid pissing off Republicans. Democrats were, at most, an afterthought.

Perhaps Musk would care to comment on this? It's not as if he's media shy, after all.

Today the BEA released inflation figures for December, and there was both good news and bad news:

Headline PCE inflation dropped nearly to zero in December. That's the good news. However, core PCE inflation ticked up a bit to 3.5%. That's not terrible, but it does indicate that core inflation is dropping at a pretty moderate rate.

Food inflation dropped to 2.9% in December, continuing its steady drop since July:

Overall, this is a good report. All we have to do now is get inflation in services down and we'll be in good shape.

Today's big New York Times piece about the Durham investigation is chock full of goodies about how Donald Trump and his lackeys desperately tried to prove that the FBI had illegally opened an investigation of Trump for no good reason. Attorney General Bill Barr and his special counsel, John Durham, were obsessed about this and became increasingly agitated as their investigation continued and they were unable to find anything that backed up their suspicions. They never did. We know now that, in fact, Trump's presidential campaign did have links to the Russian government. The FBI did have a perfectly sensible reason to open an investigation into this. Vladimir Putin did try to interfere with the election in Trump's favor. And several members of Durham's team did quit because of disagreements with him over prosecutorial ethics.

There's no single smoking gun in the story, just a long series of incidents that paint a damning picture of Barr's Justice Department. In one of them, Barr received a tip from Italian intelligence:

[In 2019] the Times reported that Mr. Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.

The news reports, however, were all framed around the erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation must mean Mr. Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry. Mr. Barr, who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening.

Barr was normally a chatterbox, constantly tossing out tidbits about the investigation that made it seem as if they had the goods on the FBI. This time, however, he kept his mouth shut.

Why? Because the tip from the Italians linked Trump to financial crimes. That was the criminal investigation, but Barr saw no need to correct reporters who thought he was looking into criminal conduct by the FBI.

Nothing came of this investigation, but it's telling nevertheless. And it's a warning to everyone to take Durham's final report with a salt mine's worth of skepticism when it comes out. Past experience tells us that Durham will do his best to make it look like the FBI was guilty of massive crimes even though he was unable to prove any of them and unable to successfully prosecute even the minor charges he took to court.

Poor John Durham. He made his own bed, but this was partly because he got sucked into the black hole that is Donald Trump. Everyone who associates with Trump comes out of it looking worse than when they went in, and that's what happened to Durham. In 2019 he was a respected veteran prosecutor. Four years later that reputation is in tatters. Nomen amicitiae sic, quatenus expedit, haeret.

Astronomy week sputters to a close today.

My weekend trip to the desert yielded three images (the comet, the Orion Nebula, and a star trails picture), so I don't have anything for today. My only choice is to use an older astronomy photo, but I don't have any of those in the queue either.

What do do? Well, I have one picture that I eventually deleted because I never quite got it to work. So I decided to resurrect it and give it another try, which you can see below. It's the moon and Jupiter taken a few months ago, and it's OK. Not great, but OK.

Next week: the return of terrestrial photos!

I got some pushback on Twitter about my comment yesterday that ChatGPT would replace most lawyers in a few years time. My reply: "I wonder how long it will be until a computer is able to pass the bar exam?"

Today I sort of get an answer:

How well can AI models write law school exams without human assistance? To find out, we used the widely publicized AI model ChatGPT to generate answers on four real exams at the University of Minnesota Law School. We then blindly graded these exams as part of our regular grading processes for each class. Over 95 multiple choice questions and 12 essay questions, ChatGPT performed on average at the level of a C+ student, achieving a low but passing grade in all four courses.

So ChatGPT is performing at a C+ level on graduate level work. In a year that will be a B+ and in another year an A+. And remember, ChatGPT responds to criticism, so it can make changes based on conversation with a supervising lawyer.

Anyway, my guess is that GPT v5.0 or v6.0 (we're currently at v3.5) will be able to take over the business of writing briefs and so forth with only minimal supervision. After that, it only takes one firm to figure out that all the partners can get even richer if they turn over most of the work of associates to a computer. Soon everyone will follow. Then the price of legal advice will plummet, too, at all but the very highest levels.

I might be totally wrong about this. But for some reason lots of people assume that software like ChatGPT will get better at regurgitating facts but will never demonstrate "real judgment." This is dangerously wrong, partly because we humans narcissistically assume that our own judgment is well nigh irreplaceable. Anyone in law school today should think long and hard about this.

Elon Musk took out $13 billion in bridge loans when he bought Twitter—and bridge loans are just that: a short-term bridge until you get permanent financing. Bridge loans are also expensive, so Musk is highly motivated to replace his with lower-cost financing. The Wall Street Journal says he's trying hard to do that:

The state of the fundraising talks couldn’t be learned. In mid-December, Mr. Musk’s team reached out to new and existing backers about raising new equity capital at the original Twitter takeover price. Mr. Musk’s advisers had hoped to reach a deal to raise cash at the initial takeover price by the end of 2022.

Say what? Musk and his bankers were trying to sell shares of Twitter at the $54 price Musk paid for them? Even though they were valued at less than 40 bucks on the public market after Musk announced his deal? Who would be insane enough to overpay as much as Musk did? And why would Musk think anyone would do it?

Musk needs to get his ass back into the real world, and he needs to do it fast.

Today was GDP day, and it turns out that GDP growth in the last quarter of 2022 was just like the wee bear's porridge: not too hot and not too cold:

There are no surprises in the details. Personal expenditures were up, private investment was up (except for houses), and government expenditures were up. Growth was very evenly spread.

With any luck, the Q4 number was high enough to indicate that the economy is still doing OK, but not so high that the Fed wigs out and decides to crush future growth with more interest rate hikes. Cross your fingers.

One of the rotating quotes at the top of the blog is, "Republicans are evil; Democrats are idiots." The Washington Post presents the latest evidence:

President Biden is facing blowback from some members of his own party over his mishandling of sensitive documents as his allies express growing concern that the case could get in the way of Democrats’ momentum coming out of the midterm elections.

I don't think party members need to robotically repeat talking points from their leadership, but the difference here between Republicans and Democrats is astonishing. Donald Trump, who isn't even president any longer, received nothing but hardcore support for both his refusal to admit that he had classified documents in his possession and his persistent unwillingness to cooperate after it turned out he was lying. In fact, far from criticizing him, Republicans and Fox News turned the whole thing around and added it to their bonfire of complaints about the FBI targeting innocent Republicans.

But Joe Biden, who is president, is getting only tepid support from his own party even though his error is minuscule at most. This is an almost 100% repeat of the halfhearted support Hillary Clinton got from her fellow Democrats while Republicans (and the FBI!) were gutting her campaign during the whole email affair.

This happens over and over. When things like this crop up, Democrats seem frozen in fear that someone, somewhere, might eventually find some genuinely damaging evidence and then they'd be—

What? A little embarrassed that they'd supported a guy who turned out to be guilty?

It's so aggravating. I wouldn't even want Democrats to act like Republicans, but could they at least act like a normal party? It's pretty obvious that the Biden document affair is a nothingburger, no matter what Fox News says. Nobody needs to protect themselves against the possibility that it might turn out to be a real scandal. And if, against all odds, it does anyway? There will be plenty of time to load your howitzers then.

In the meantime, please stop being idiots. Please.

You may be familiar with something called the Flynn Effect. It's named after James Flynn, a researcher who discovered that IQs had been rising about three points per decade for most of the 20th century.

The evidence for this has been replicated numerous times and is now accepted as pretty rock solid. I've always had a hard time with it, though, since it suggests that, relative to today, the average IQ of people in the 1920s was about 70. This is roughly a 6th grade level, so it means that the Jazz Age was mostly populated by a bunch of 6th graders.

That doesn't sound right, does it? Then again, I suppose F. Scott Fitzgerald didn't hang around with ordinary people very much, so maybe our view of the '20s is distorted.

In any case, there's now a controversy over whether this IQ increase has continued into the 21st century. I'll spare you all the gruesome details about g-loading and fluid vs. crystallized intelligence and just show you the numbers:

The Flynn Effect, according to some researchers, has slowed down a bit but is still going strong. But a few others, mostly relying on administrative data from conscripts in Scandinavian countries, say that the Flynn Effect slowed down in the 1960s and then reversed. If it's continued along this path, it would mean that Team Flynn estimates an increase of about 14 IQ points since 1960 while Team Reversal estimates a decline of about 3 points.

That's a big difference! And you'd think someone would try to research this. One obvious way is to get a copy of, say, a Stanford-Binet test from 1960 and administer it to a random group of a few hundred people. Would their average score be 100, as it is on a modern IQ test, or would it be around 115, suggesting that we're so smart these days that we score like geniuses on older tests?

This would be neither a difficult nor an expensive study. Why has no one done it?

The Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor issued a report yesterday about the cost of child care. It uses data from their newly launched National Database of Childcare Prices, and I was interested to discover that the most expensive place in the country for child care is California:

The main takeaway from the report was their conclusion that "childcare prices are untenable for families across all care types, age groups, and county population sizes." I suppose I don't doubt that, but I was disappointed that they didn't show the price of child care over time. As you may recall, "compared to what?" is the key question to ask about nearly any sociological claim.

So I did it myself, which turned out to be a far bigger pain in the butt than I anticipated. Here it is for a random collection of big and small counties plus a population-weighted national average:¹

The database only goes back to 2008, so this is all we have. Nationally, the price of preschool went up 7% between 2008-18 after adjustments for inflation, most of which was due to price rises in big population centers. Boston (Suffolk County) was up 18%, for example, and Los Angeles was up 15%. By contrast, smaller counties were generally up by no more more than a few percentage points.

None of this is to say that families don't have a hard time paying for child care. Obviously they do. Both this report and long-term inflation data suggest that the cost of child care has been rising steadily for decades by a little less than half a percent per year.

My interpretation of this is that child care may not be in a sudden crisis right now, but at the very least it's a long-term time bomb. Unfortunately, it's all but impossible to get Republicans to care about it. I wonder how sure they are that their constituents are OK with this?

¹This is for preschool. The report and the database also cover infant care and toddler care.