Author: Kevin Drum

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the 2021 version of the Survey of Consumer Expenditures today. It's not complete, but it has all the major categories. The chart below shows the growth of consumer expenditures in 2019, 2020, and 2021:

Income was down 1% in 2021 while total expenditures were up 4.2% Both figures are adjusted for inflation, which amounted to 4.7% in 2021.

There are, obviously, lots of expenditure categories that were down in the pandemic year of 2020: food, restaurants, apparel, personal care, education, and others.

But 2021 was a different story. The amount spend on homes and education were down a bit, but that's all. Every other category showed an increase. The largest were in food, restaurants, apparel, transportation, entertainment, and personal care.

Those are the basics. More analysis to come, I'm sure. The basic good news is that even during the second stage of the pandemic, incomes remained about flat and expenditures were up substantially. That's what saved our economy, and it's largely due to Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus at the beginning of the year.

This morning Marian and I made our first trip to City of Hope to get things rolling on my CAR-T treatment. It was an adventure.

I'll spare you the routine griping and get straight to our meeting with the doctor. We were running late so he launched into his spiel right away, explaining how Abecma works by modifying my T-cells and then—

"Abecma?"

"Yes, that's the name of the drug."

"That doesn't sound right. Hold on...."

I had blanked on the name of the drug I was expecting, but I did some googling while the doctor kept talking.

"Carvykti! That's the one we talked about when I first came in. I've been following its progress for years."

Discussion follows. It ends like this:

"When a slot opens up, we give it to the top person on the waiting list and they get whatever drug is available."

"But—"

"And both drugs are about the same anyway. Carvykti has a 92-95% response rate, while Abecma is around 90%."

Long story short, I agreed to the Abecma, but only to buy myself time to go home and check things out. It's always dangerous for a layman to do this, but the clinical trials were pretty clear: Abecma had a 72% response rate and Carvykti had a 98% response rate. But there's more: Abecma had a 29% "stringent complete" response rate while Carvykti clocked in at 83%.

That's an enormous difference, and the stringent complete response is what you really want. This kind of response means that the level of cancerous cells is so low they can't be detected.

Anyway, I was just on the verge of calling back to cancel tomorrow's leukapheresis appointment when the doctor called me. He felt bad about the misunderstanding etc. etc. and now acknowledged that Carvykti was, in fact, more effective. "And it lasts longer, too!"

So we all agreed to put me back on the waiting list, this time specifically for a Carvykti slot. This probably means a few more months of waiting, but it also means a far greater likelihood of success. In the meantime, it's back to chemo and the evil dex for me.

The bureaucracy giveth and the bureaucracy taketh away. This is not what I was expecting today, but I guess things could be worse.

This is one of the tree-lined paths at the Rodin Museum in Paris. It's really a beautiful place.

How's our crystal ball working these days? Let's roll the tape:

August 12: Kevin says the "nuclear secrets" taken from Mar-a-Lago were probably "intel about other countries' nuclear programs."

September 6: The Washington post reports that the FBI had found a document "describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities."

Always trust Kevin Drum for the finest in blog-based prophecy.

I know it's Wednesday, but better late than never:

The price of gasoline dropped another dime last week. Life under President Biden just keeps getting better and better!

Here is the price of natural gas in the US and Europe:

Until February, the US and European prices of natural gas were generally within a few dollars of each other. Today, the US price is $9 and the average price in Europe is about $70.

Much of this is because Europe is trying to replace Russian gas with liquefied natural gas from other countries. However, Europe doesn't have enough capacity at its LNG ports to come even close to making up the loss from Russia. This supply constraint has produced bidding wars with Japan and South Korea that have caused natural gas prices to skyrocket around the world. In the US, by contrast, we have plenty of domestic supply and prices are low and fairly stable.

This is why Europe is way more panicked about energy prices this winter than we are.

During our stay in Paris a pair of wood pigeons came and sat together outside our window every evening around dusk. They seemed quite attached to each other, cooing softly for a couple of hours before flying off somewhere else for the night. They were lovely companions in the ruddy light of the setting sun.

This is off the beaten path, but this tweet reminded me of something:

horoscopes are obviously BS, Meyers-Briggs is silly, I don't even understand what the enneagram is, but shared generational characteristics are as real as gravity

— Suderman (@petersuderman) September 1, 2022

The Myers-Briggs personality test gets a lot of abuse, and mostly for good reason. It's a mish-mash of stuff based loosely on Jungian archetypes that are no longer taken seriously, and it has little connection to modern views of personality traits. It's never been tested for validity or reliability, and its 16 different personality types (or "Type Indicators," thus MBTI as the formal name of the test) are probably kind of meaningless.

But that doesn't make it useless. It's fun and easy to take, and if you administer it to a large group it teaches a valuable lesson: people are different. That may seem pretty obvious, but it's surprisingly less obvious than you'd think. If you watch group interactions—especially contentious ones—it's clear that lots of people operate with no real understanding that other people aren't just being stubborn about recognizing "obvious" truths; they genuinely have different ways of viewing the world.

One of the things the MBTI does is devote some time to explaining (a) how different personality types are good at different things, and (b) how you should interact with different personality types. Even if the specific advice is questionable, the simple idea that you should acknowledge differences in people and act accordingly is fairly valuable.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course you want to know what personality type I am. I'm an INTJ. Is that meaningless? Well, the MBTI is basically a set of questions that asks things about your personality. Do you like being around other people? Do you like to work through problems logically? Are you empathetic toward other people?

In a nutshell (to take just one personality trait), it asks in various ways if you're introverted or extroverted. If you mostly answer extroverted, then it says you're extroverted. Amazing! This is not rocket science, and it's likely to be at least reasonably accurate. So even on this measure, I doubt the MBTI is all that bad. I mean, that INTJ description sounds a lot like me, doesn't it?

Here's a chart someone linked to on Twitter yesterday. It shows housing prices in various cities:

The basic idea here is that if you put up more regulatory barriers to building new housing, the price of housing goes up. I don't really doubt this. How could it be otherwise, in fact?

That said, take a look at Los Angeles and Riverside. Both are in Southern California. Both have almost exactly the same level of regulation. And yet housing in Los Angeles costs nearly twice as much as it does in Riverside. That's a huge difference.

What accounts for it? The answer is hardly rocket science: LA is a more desirable location than Riverside, which is hot, culturally desolate, and mostly just an endless sea of suburban houses.

In other words, desirable places have higher housing prices regardless of regulatory issues. Regulation can certainly make things worse, but I think it's pretty clearly a secondary consideration.

I'm not quite sure what set me off this time, but something I read prompted me to make a couple of charts illustrating US economic performance compared to our large peer countries in Europe. Here is GDP since the start of the pandemic:

Thanks to the $3 trillion in relief spending that was passed almost immediately after the economy started to plummet in response to COVID-19, our GDP fell only about 10% during the first stage of the pandemic. This compares to nearly 20% in Italy, France, and the UK (Germany's economy responded more like ours). Because of this we had an easier time rebounding.

We passed another $1 trillion in relief in Q4 of 2020, which helped boost performance as we were climbing out of the COVID hole, and then another $1.9 trillion in Q1 of 2021, which helped boost performance further.

The end result of all this is that we suffered less during the early stages of the pandemic and recovered more strongly in the later stages. That's good!

But wait. The final $1.9 trillion that Democrats passed in 2021 also produced surging inflation. This is probably true, but take a look at how we compare:

This is month-over-month inflation converted into annual rates. As I've said many times before, this produces noisy raw data (shown by the pale thin lines) and is of little use. What you need to look at are the trendlines, which are the heavy dashed lines.

As you can see, our inflation rate was indeed higher than other countries in 2021. But by the end of the year it was starting to decline as the Biden stimulus spending finished working its way through the system. Conversely, inflation in large European countries is still increasing. (UK inflation is trending down at the moment, but every forecast suggests it's going to skyrocket going into next year.)

A couple of notes about all this. First, I've used core inflation so that Europe doesn't look unfairly bad thanks to high energy prices caused by the Ukraine war. Second, for the US I've used an approximation of HICP, which is the EU method of measuring inflation. This ensures that the comparison is apples to apples. US performance looks better if you use core PCE instead.

Bottom line: our huge spending produced strong economic growth that kept the economy from shrinking too much and forestalled a tremendous amount of human suffering. At the same time, the inflation it produced was higher than Europe's in 2021 but is now falling. A year from now, no matter how you measure it, the American economy is going to look like a major success story compared to our peer countries.