Author: Kevin Drum

Several months ago Donald Trump lost his bizarre lawsuit against an array of his worst imagined enemies. On Thursday his enemies had their say:

A Florida-based federal judge has ordered nearly $1 million in sanctions against Donald Trump and his attorney Alina Habba, calling the former president a “mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.”...In the new order, Hillary Clinton got the biggest award of fees for a single defendant: almost $172,000.

Losing the lawsuit is bad enough. Getting fined a million bucks is bad enough. But having a huge chunk of the fine go directly to Hillary Clinton? Priceless.

Clinton should announce that she's contributing the entire sum to ________. My brain is foggy and I need someone else to fill in the blank. What would piss off Trump the most?

POSTSCRIPT: Today Trump dropped his lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Coincidence? I doubt it.

This is the dome of the crematorium at the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris—permanent resting place of Jim Morrison and lots of other famous folk. It's a great picture because there's scaffolding covering the entire building right now, which extends up to about an inch below what you can see from this angle. You'd never even know it was there.

Uber-blogger-turned-substacker Matt Yglesias was profiled in the Washington Post last week, so now everyone is talking about Matt Yglesias. What's his secret? Why is he so popular? Whatever you happen to think of the quality, wit, or erudition of Matt's writing, there's no question that one of his talents is sheer quantity. He can churn out a lot of stuff and he can (apparently) do it forever without burning out.

Max Read says this is a key requirement for contemporary bloggers, content creators, and newsletter proprietors, which he calls regularity:

I say “regularity” instead of “consistency” because “consistency” sort of implies quality to me, and reliable quality is of only passing importance compared to reliable production. “Regularity,” on the other hand, reminds me, appropriately, of bowel movements.

Ahem. But I have to admit this is disturbingly accurate. I've never had Matt's ambition, mainly because I'm older than he is and already had lots of money by the time I started blogging, but we do share one thing in common: we like to write all the time.

My first real job was as a technical writer for a tech company. During the interview, my prospective boss—who currently fixes classic cars in Florida—asked me what seemed like an odd question: "Do you enjoy the act of putting your fingers on a keyboard and making words come out?"¹

Well . . . yes. I do. I've spent the past 40 years putting my fingers on keyboards and making vast quantities of words come out. As it happens, I don't think you can feel this way unless there's some minimal quality to your work,² but it hardly has to be Shakespearian level. My writing is basically workmanlike—sort of AP style writ large—but that's enough. It's reasonably clear, personal, and easy to read, which is enough for anyone who happens to enjoy reading about my particular hobby horses (i.e., charts, lead, inflation, amateur research, Republicans, other people being wrong on the internet, etc.).

And that's about it. Accuracy is great. Wittiness is great. Good spelling is great. But in this business it's really all about enjoying the act of writing constantly and quickly. There are surprisingly few people like this, and those who are can do well if they also demonstrate at least a minimum level of quality—which I will not try to define.

I'm a walking, talking example of this. In fact, this very post is an example of this. It would have gone entirely unwritten and unmissed if something else had flitted across my brain this morning, but nothing did and I really felt like putting my fingers on the keyboard and making some words come out. So I did.

¹Or something along those lines. It was 40 years ago, so cut me some slack.

²Psychopathic serial killer types excepted, of course.

Nouriel Roubini is . . . not optimistic these days:

What I have called megathreats others have called a “polycrisis” — which the Financial Times recently named its buzzword of the year. For her part, Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, speaks of a “confluence of calamities”. The world economy, she warned last year, is facing “perhaps its biggest test since the second world war”. Similarly, the former US secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H Summers argues that we are facing the most acute economic and financial challenges since the 2008 financial crisis. And in its latest global risks report — released just before elites gathered in Davos this month to discuss “cooperation in a fragmented world” — the World Economic Forum warns of “a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come”.

Hmmm. "Buzzword" is pretty much the opposite of "deeply thought out." After all, the 2022 buzzword of the year among the chattering classes was apparently "ussy," which is now being made a suffix for every possible word in the English language.¹

As for the rest, calm down, people. There are always multiple crises floating around, and the ones we're personally facing always seem far more dangerous than the crises of past generations. But this is an illusion, a combination of recency bias and the fact that we know how all the past crises worked out (i.e., we're still alive so how bad could they have been?).

It's always possible that we're entering a new age of annual pandemics or something, but there's no special reason to think so. At the moment, the only two really, really serious crises are climate change and artificial intelligence. And while I'll grant that climate change is a calamity in the waiting, artificial intelligence isn't—at least, it doesn't have to be. If we assume that chess-playing computers don't accidentally destroy us all, the main effect of AI-powered robots will be to do all our work for us—and fix climate change while they're at it. That sounds pretty nice.

Of course, this assumes that the human race can act decently, instead of like the greedy mofos we've been throughout history. After all, taking advantage of AI means little more than fairly distributing the products of all that free labor.

That should be easy, right? All we have to do is act decently! How difficult can that be, you lizard-brained cretins? Every time I think about this, it makes my blood boi—

Ah, right. What was I saying? Oh yes: we just have to overcome our lizard-brained selves and treat other people decently. So it's really a monocrisis, not a polycrisis. But it's a big 'un.

¹As in, say, "That's a hell of a blogussy you have there, Kevin!" Do you think this makes no sense whatsoever? Welcome to the over-40 club.

All year long I kept hearing that labor unions were making a comeback in 2022. Apparently I was misled:

The good news, such as it is, is that the number of private sector union members went up by about 200,000. But that was only because the number of total workers went up. The unionization rate fell from 6.1% in 2021 to 6.0% in 2022.

Among public sector workers, the unionization rate fell from 33.9% to 33.1%.

Check out the latest numbers for PPI inflation:

PPI is basically inflation at the wholesale level: it's the price that domestic producers get for the initial sale of their products, and it's often a forerunner of consumer inflation.

As usual, I'm showing monthly inflation that's been annualized. Headline PPI came in at -5.8% and core PPI stood at +1.6%—well below the Fed target of 2%.

(If you insist on year-over-year figures—which you shouldn't—headline PPI in December was 6.2% and core PPI was 5.5%.)

This is good news, confirming the dramatic drop in inflation that we've already seen in both the CPI and PCE indexes. In a few more months inflation will seem like a mirage.

POSTSCRIPT: I've never noticed this before, but PPI is reported as a month-over-month number while CPI is reported as a year-over-year number. I don't know why.

This is from the "Things That Make You Go Hmmm" file. It's the pediment (?) of a building in Paris photographed from the Coulée Verte.

Brad Plumer says on Twitter

Don't think I understood how dramatic China's demographic shift was until I saw this graph.

Let's take a look. Here's the chart Brad is talking about:

That is indeed pretty startling. Then again, here's the same chart for the United States:

This isn't quite as startling, but it's not wildly different from the Chinese chart except for one thing: the stunning drop in Chinese births starting in 2018. In 2016, China abandoned its one-child policy and there was an immediate uptick in births, followed by a small downtick the next year. But then things went off the rails.

Birth rates might have recovered after that, but apparently Chinese couples had a massive reaction to COVID-19 and just stopped having babies. Birth rates dropped in the US too, but only by a small amount.

The result is that between 2017 and today (through 2021), births dropped about 5% in the US but by more than a third in China. Perhaps that will turn around in 2024 after China emerges from its COVID year.

Perhaps. If it doesn't, the Chinese workforce is going is to suddenly implode starting around 2038. But who knows? Maybe it won't matter by then.

POSTSCRIPT: This was a stunningly difficult post to write. The CDC provides an absolute mass of statistics on every subtopic of births and deaths you can imagine, but it's nearly impossible to get a simple table of crude births and deaths. It's only because of my dedication to you, my loyal readers, that I persevered and eventually cobbled together the US data.

I've been off the dex for a couple of weeks now, and this is mostly a Very Good Thing. Still, I used to schedule telescope activities for dex nights, which was pretty convenient since I needed to stay up all night and that's exactly what dex did.

So how would I do without the dex? Last night was my first test, and the answer is: Boy am I tired. Driving home at 4 am was no fun, and I flopped into bed as soon as I got home. Now I'm up, but my 64-year-old body is not happy at getting only two or three hours of sleep.

And that was only for a night at Palomar, which is relatively close to home. I don't think I could make the 3-hour drive home from the desert—not safely, anyway. I'm not sure yet what the solution is.

A Twitter reader reminded me of this righteous rant about the George Bush era from 2011:

Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it’s treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at.

Hell, I don't talk about this anymore either. So much unbelievable shit has swirled down the sewer since then that it really does seem a bit like a dreamscape. I dunno. Maybe it never happened. Anybody else remember this stuff or is it just me?