Author: Kevin Drum

A reader has suggested that fare evasion is a good measure of the low-level disorder I wrote about yesterday. Maybe! And in New York City it's way up:

I'm of three minds on this. On the one hand, it's obviously a symptom of low-level lawbreaking, and it's not really pandemic related. Fare evasion did spike during the pandemic, but then it returned to precisely the trendline it was on beforehand. If the pandemic had never happened, fare evasion would probably still be way up.

On the other hand, fare evasion isn't really a sign of disorder. It doesn't hurt anyone, after all. It doesn't even directly annoy anyone or make the subway less safe.

On the third hand, the increase in fare evasion matches perfectly with the 2018 announcement by the city's DA that he would no longer prosecute fare evaders. This was not for woke reasons (poor people can't afford to pay, etc.), it was because it wasn't cost effective. Nonetheless it's an example of encouraging minor lawbreaking by simply giving up on enforcement.

The increase in fare evasion also (kinda) matches up with an increase in social media meme videos about how to evade fares. But I'm not sure if this confirms or contradicts the notion that fare evasion is a symptom of rising disorder.

So I'm afraid I don't have any strong conclusions to draw about this. I just thought I'd toss it out for everyone to gnaw on.

A few weeks ago I showed you a pair of pictures of the rose window at the Votivkirche in Vienna. Here's the church itself, spectacularly lit up at night.

Tyler Cowen points me to this today:

23.4 million government employees! That's some context. But here's some better context:

Kalshi's number includes state and local workers, most of them teachers. The number of federal workers, which is all Musk cares about, comes to 3 million. Just a slight difference.

In any case, the 60,000 bet is a big change from yesterday, when eager Musk groupies were offering to take bets on 100,000 workers getting fired—and an even bigger change from last week, when it was at 160,000. Apparently the saner bits of the betting market have re-tethered them to reality.

But the whole thing is even weirder than it sounds. The bet in this case is how many federal workers will be gone by January 2026 even though Musk isn't scheduled to make recommendations until July 2026. And just for reference, direct federal employment grew by 70,000 during Trump's first term.

Semafor reports that the Chinese government is unhappy with their investment in Twitter:

State outlets, which put considerable resources into amassing millions of followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform — including by buying ads, deploying bots, and hiring influencers — have recently seen their growth plateau.

The growing popularity of Bluesky, which has a largely liberal base and harder-to-manipulate algorithm, has sparked “worried chatter within Chinese state media circles,” a former Xinhua and China Daily employee wrote in his newsletter.

Huh. I wonder if Elon is aware of this? But even if he is, I imagine his giant Tesla factory in Shanghai keeps him keenly aware of the need to accommodate the needs of the Chinese state.

Average home prices were up last month, and suddenly nobody wants one anymore:

That's a drop of 128,000 homes from the previous month. It's the fifth biggest decline in history.

Matt Yglesias says today that although serious crime is down, "a lot of lower-level disorder that spiked alongside shootings in 2020 never went back to normal."

Unlike in some areas where I think the Biden administration made clear policy errors, I don’t know that they did anything wrong about this national epidemic of low-level disorder. But for whatever reason, they weren’t willing or able to articulate the basic fact, visible to everyone, that standards of conduct had slipped and that something needed to be done.

I agree that public disorder needs to be policed. Not because it's likely to have any effect on more serious crime, but for its own sake. Civic disorder is annoying at best and scary at worst. There's no reason we should ignore quality-of-life issues like this.

But I'm skeptical of this "epidemic" of disorder. Partly this is because I can't figure out why there should be one. There are a few things that might plausibly underlie low-level disorder, but they're mostly getting better. For example, homelessness has declined everywhere but California until a tiny spike last year:

Aside from recreational marijuana, drug use is down for all age groups.¹ Ditto for alcohol abuse.

Thanks to lower lead poisoning among children, antisocial behavior of all kinds has dropped dramatically among teens:

Add this all up and homelessness is mostly down; drug use is down; teen behavior is better; plus incomes are up and poverty is down. None of this means public disorder hasn't increased. But it does mean it would sure be mysterious if it has.

So what's the evidence for increasing disorder? It's very thin: airline passengers are acting up and traffic deaths are still high. On the other hand, in New York City transit crime is declining and 311 calls to report nuisances have plummeted:

Ruthless shoplifting gangs terrorizing drug stores and supermarkets are in the news regularly, but retailers themselves don't report any rise:

Anecdotally, Charles Fain Lehman visited Chatanooga and reported back: "Even as violent crime has largely receded, there are multiple indicators suggesting that another problem persists: disorder." But if you read his very detailed piece, there's not much there. Even minor crimes are mostly down over the past couple of years.

I just don't know. This is another example of vibes vs. data and I don't know which side to take. It's especially difficult in this case because there's no measure of low-level disorder to look at. It's hard to even come up with credible proxies.

As always, the question isn't whether civic disorder exists. Of course it does. Most big cities have open-air drug markets, homeless encampments, reckless drivers, and people who are just plain annoying. But is there more of it? It sure seems like there's no reason there should be, and what little data we have doesn't support the notion of a big rise. Any thoughts?

¹Marijuana use is flat among teens and up among adults, mostly thanks to legalization.

Boris Epshteyn is in big trouble:

A top adviser to President-elect Donald Trump asked potential administration nominees to give him monthly consulting fees in exchange for advocating for them to Trump, a written review by Trump’s legal team concluded.... It found that among those whom Epshteyn had unsuccessfully solicited for payment was Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for treasury secretary.

Trump commissioned the report after he heard allegations that Epshteyn had been asking potential Cabinet nominees and others for money, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal document.

Epshteyn is already under indictment in Arizona for promoting a fake electors scheme to overturn the 2020 election, but obviously Trump doesn't care about that. He's also been charged with assault a couple of times stemming from bar fights, but Trump doesn't care about that either. He's also something of an asshole, getting into screaming matches with colleagues, but Trump doesn't care. And guess what?

Trump told Just the News in a brief interview, "I suppose every President has people around them who try to make money off them on the outside. It's a shame but it happens," he said. "But no one working for me in any capacity should be looking to make money. They should only be here to Make America Great Again."

He continued to Just the News: "No one can promise any endorsement or nomination except me. I make these decisions on my own, period."

It sure doesn't sound like Trump cares much about this either. "It's a shame," but hey, in Trumpworld everyone is expected to be on the take.

This is the Iron Mountain Chapel, about 50 miles east of Twentynine Palms off Highway 62. It was built back when Gen. George Patton was training tank troops at the Desert Training Center he founded in California during World War II.

There were actually two chapels at Camp Iron Mountain, one Catholic and one Protestant. This is the Catholic one. The General Patton Memorial Museum is nearby at Chiriaco Summit off Interstate 10.

Yesterday I posted a brief item noting that the CDC never recommended that schools be closed during COVID. In fact, by July 2020, shortly before the new school year was about to start, they were strongly recommending that schools open in the fall.

So why did so many schools close? The answer is that the decisions were mostly made by states and local school districts, partly based on CDC guidance about how to reopen safely. To that extent the CDC did play a role, though probably one that even its critics wouldn't take issue with. Their safety guidance was generally pretty solid.

More important was probably public opinion. It's easy to forget what things were like when COVID was new, but people were scared and most parents didn't want schools to reopen quickly. Here's a KFF poll from July 2020, just before the start of the new school year:

Of the people polled, 63% wanted to open schools later rather than sooner. 71% said schools needed more resources and weren't ready to open. And 70% were worried their child would get COVID if they returned to school.

The results leaned even more heavily toward closure among low-income parents—which makes sense since they were most likely to live in areas where schools were likely to have trouble reopening safely.

Other polls at the same time showed similar results. In one poll, parents favored closure over reopening by 54-36%. In an EdChoice poll, 69% said they'd enroll their kids in distance learning if their school offered it. In an Ipsos poll, only 16% favored full reopening. An S360 poll gave the same result in California.

Most polls also showed noticeable differences between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats consistently took COVID more seriously and were more likely to favor keeping schools closed, so it's no surprise that Democratic states and cities were the most likely to close schools. They were doing what their constituents wanted.

And despite what we all think now, these policies were relatively popular at the time. An Ipsos poll in late 2021, after a year of COVID and closures, showed that 75% of parents felt their local schools had done a pretty good job dealing with the pandemic:

The moral of all this is not to let your memory play tricks on you. It might seem obvious now that schools should have remained open, but parents at the time didn't all agree. Most of them were worried about possible learning loss—they weren't naive about that—but still favored caution about sending their kids back to classrooms. Under the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that local school boards did what they wanted.

POSTSCRIPT: As it happens, I was skeptical of school closings from the start. But even now it's not an open-and-shut case. The danger of sending kids back to school was probably small, but the evidence suggests the ill effects of closing schools was probably small too. There was significant learning loss, but it doesn't appear to be related to school closures. Everyone suffered equally, whether they attended classes in person or stayed home. See here, here, and here. It was something more broadly about the pandemic that caused learning loss, not distance learning.

In other words, a cost-benefit analysis of school closures is tricky even now.

Here are the states with the most progressive and most regressive tax systems:

In Minnesota the rich pay 70% more than the poor. In Florida the rich pay 79% less than the poor.

It will come as no surprise that every one of the progressive tax states voted for Kamala Harris and nearly all of the regressive tax states (8 out of 10) voted for Donald Trump.