Author: Kevin Drum

I've mentioned before that the official definition of rent inflation is all but useless since (a) it's always about six months behind and (b) it uses figures for all rents, not just new rentals, which are all that really matter. So what happens if you take core inflation but then swap out the official rent numbers for better ones? Jason Furman has the answer:

Updated core CPI swapping in spot rents on new leases for all rent on existing leases.

Core CPI w/ spot rents up at a 2.8% annual rate over the last three months (and actually 0.0% in October). That compares to a 5.8% annual rate for actual core CPI. pic.twitter.com/hA6xnyN4zJ

— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) November 16, 2022

What this tells us is that not only has core inflation been steadily dropping for the past year, it's now below 3%. That's only barely above the Fed's target.

Core inflation is now at pretty normal levels, and there's really nothing much we can do about non-core inflation (food and energy). It's long past time for the Fed to see the light on this.

 

This is a picture of feet. In particular, these feet are crossing a glass footbridge that connects two galleries in our new Orange County Museum of Art.

Perhaps you think I should have been paying more attention to the art itself? No worries. I've got some pictures of that too. You just have to be patient.

Everywhere we went in Paris, Marian was greeted by a giant M. Such a friendly folk, those Parisians.

(This one is for the Dugommier metro station on Line 6.)

Over at MarketWatch, Jeffrey Lee Funk and Gary Smith present a list of Silicon Valley's biggest losers:

I don't have any real comment on this except yikes. I didn't quite realize you could lose this much money. I'm such a hayseed.

A reader asks what I think of the theory that Republican losses in the midterms were partially due to Republicans killing off their own voters by railing against COVID-19 vaccines. He points to this piece by Jonathan Last as an example:

Lots of factors were at play. Including one that doesn’t get talked about much: excess COVID deaths. There’s been an ongoing study of the Republican resistance to the COVID vaccines and the preliminary findings suggest that post-vaccine, Republicans accounted for about 80 percent more of the excess deaths than Democrats.

....Many of the Republican losses were by extremely small margins. For example: Adam Laxalt lost the Nevada Senate race by 6,000 votes. (Go look at that COVID number again.)

The best estimate of partisan differences in COVID deaths that I know of is from an NBER paper that Last links to here. Three Yale researchers concluded that in the post-vaccine era (starting around May 2021) the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points higher than it was for Democrats. That's everything we need to know. All that's left is a bit of arithmetic:

• The overall excess death rate in the US during this period was about 600,000, or 12%.
• Therefore, the D excess rate is 9.3% and the R excess rate is 14.7%.
• Assuming a roughly even split of D and R voters, that comes to 232,000 excess D deaths and 367,000 excess R deaths.
• That's a difference of 135,000 extra Republican deaths.

That's not enough, no matter how many what ifs you toss out. Nevada, for example, accounts for about 1% of the total US population, so it probably accounts for about 1,300 extra Republican deaths. Even in the ultra-tight Senate race, it means only that Adam Laxalt lost by 6,000 votes instead of 5,000.

The COVID theory is an appealing one, but the numbers just aren't there. In a race decided by a tenth of a percent or so, you might argue that vaccine denial played a role. But that's how close it would have to be.¹

¹The closest Senate race was Nevada, with a winning D margin of 0.82%. The closest governor's race was Arizona at 0.78%. The closest House race at the moment is NM 2 at 0.66%, though that may change. None of these are close enough to have been plausibly decided by COVID deaths.

This is epic. Too bad we couldn't get it before the election.

.@VaughnHillyard: "Could I say something about Kari Lake, you guys?" pic.twitter.com/UvhwEtOkPD

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 15, 2022

This is it. Today the world population is officially 8 billion people.

The United Nations has declared that the world's population will pass 8 billion people on 15 November, but future growth is expected to slow as fertility rates fall across the globe https://t.co/oSbblnhHQu

— New Scientist (@newscientist) November 10, 2022

Over at National Review, Jason Richwine comments on one of my hobby horses:

Early in his first term as Florida governor, Ron DeSantis pressed the legislature to mandate universal E-Verify, the online tool run by the Department of Homeland Security that allows employers to confirm that their employees are legally authorized to work in the U.S. Unfortunately, business interests lobbied hard against it, and the bill that eventually reached the governor’s desk required E-Verify only for the public sector and its contractors....With greater political capital thanks to his smashing victory last week, DeSantis should try again for universal E-Verify.

The Republican Party has long been viewed as a happy collaboration of business conservatives and social conservatives whose interests rarely conflict. Business conservatives want low taxes and less regulation while social conservatives want abortion restrictions, gun rights, and so forth. Both sides can usually ignore the other without a problem.

But what happens on the odd occasion when a real conflict breaks out? Immigration is a great test case. Social conservatives want less of it but business conservatives want continued access to lots of cheap, docile labor. Who wins?

Let's take a look. Mandatory E-Verify works. This is why business conservatives hate it. Building a wall, by contrast, is little more than emotional symbolism, which is why social conservatives love it and business conservatives don't care one way or the other.

So what did Donald Trump do? Naturally he built a wall and ignored E-Verify. Business conservatives were happy since they knew the wall was little more than a con with no lasting impact. What did the Florida legislature—which was 70% Republican at last count—do when they were given a choice? They voted down mandatory E-Verify. Business conservatives were satisfied yet again and social conservatives were just sort of confused. They'd been suckered one more time.

So the answer to who really controls the Republican Party is: business conservatives. Nearly everyone who's really thought about it agrees that the most effective single thing we could do to rein in illegal immigration is to pass mandatory E-Verify at the national level and fund it with fines levied on employers. That would piss off business interests, which is probably the best indication that it's actually effective. It's also why it's consistently dead in the water.

Now, this would reduce ordinary illegal immigration, but it wouldn't necessarily have any effect on asylum filings, which represent a whole different problem. That requires a massive expansion of the judicial system so that asylum cases can be resolved quickly and fairly. But that's a topic for another day.

The New York Times says the price of farmland in South Dakota is shooting up, so I thought I'd show you all a picture of what this beautiful land looks like. It's a shame that—

Oh, wait. This isn't South Dakota. It's the Quail Hill Open Space Preserve about a mile from my home. The whole thing amounts to a couple of acres of scrub bordering the San Diego Freeway, and I'm not quite sure why it qualifies for preserve status. But I'm sure there's a reason.

Kevin's Three Laws of Politics:

1. Politics is always and everywhere the business of persuading the public.
   Winning power is fine. But in the long run, politics is marketing. You're doomed unless you can steadily draw the public in your direction. This law is #1 for a reason.
2. The Median Voter Theorem is holy writ.
   Yes, of course you can elect extreme true believers in strong districts. Big deal. Chuckles the clown can do the same. But enduring majorities are built on the great unwashed middle, and you need to maintain a brutal honesty about where they stand. Don't fool yourself by ignoring salience or getting suckered by vague, cost-neutral survey questions.
3. In close races, details make the difference but the details are meaningless.
   Should you advertise on Facebook or TV? Run a negative or positive campaign? Increase base turnout or try to switch centrist voters? All important questions! But at a broad level these are just the boring details of a mid-level campaign professional. Durable success depends on making the public more afraid of the other guys than they are of you.

Don't mistake details of the moment for real politics. The former is paper shuffling and bottle washing: necessary but ultimately just scutwork. In a democracy, real politics is all about appealing to public opinion on a grand scale. If you don't do that, nothing else matters.