Author: Kevin Drum

Today is inflation day, and the BLS reports that the US inflation rate rose in lockstep with the European rate announced a few days ago. The headline inflation rate went up from 7.1% in January to 7.9% in February:

Average weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, declined 0.8% from January to February. That's an annualized rate of about -10%.

Obviously Team Transitory took another big hit last month. It looks as though high inflation is lasting longer than any of them expected.

And here's one more takeaway: Corporations are using the current high inflation rate as an excuse to raise prices on just about everything. However, despite their claims of a workforce shortage, they are somehow finding the fortitude to avoid raising wages for their workers. Funny how that works.

A couple of months ago I replaced my Surface Pro 7 with a Surface Pro 8. Hope springs eternal, after all. But it's turned out to be a waste of money:

• As near as I can tell, performance is about the same as the 7.
• The bezel-less screen probably seemed like a good idea to some guy sitting in an office, but in actual use it's a pain in the ass. I have to be super careful to hold the tablet by the edge lest I accidentally click or scroll something.
• Battery life appears to be no better than the 7. Maybe slightly better?
• It comes loaded with Windows 11, which has removed the ability to place the taskbar along the left edge of the screen. You can tell me all day long that I should love having it at the bottom like everyone else, but I want it on the left where it doesn't eat up any screen space that I care about. Windows 10 allowed this, but Windows 11, with its apparent goal of looking just like an iPad, doesn't.
• The whole tablet occasionally freezes. I assume this is some kind of heat issue, with the processor halting when it gets too hot. This never happened to me on the 7.

There's nothing wrong with the Surface 8 if you're buying a new tablet from scratch—aside from the astronomical price tag and the weak battery life, problems it's always had. But if you're replacing an older Surface there's not much to recommend it.

I suppose there must be some upsides to the Surface 8. Maybe it's a better gaming machine? But I really haven't found anything that makes life better for my garden variety mishmash of browsing, reading, Excel-ing, and watching Netflix. Overall, it's been a slight downgrade from the 7.

Matt Grawitch brings to our attention a new study on alcohol consumption:

Just Half A Beer Per Day Shrinks Your Brain, Suggests Study

Bad news for casual drinkers — just one to two alcohol units a day results in lower brain volume, only getting worse as consumption increases, a new study suggests. The study continues to challenge the belief that small amounts of alcohol are of no consequence — or are even healthy — finding that those with significant brain alterations from alcohol consumption may have cognitive impairments as a result.

Grawitch has his own beef with this study, but here's mine:

Brain volume goes slightly up if you drink very small amounts (0-1 units) and is also up among men in the in the 1-2 unit category that the authors talk about. It's only down among women, and even then by only the tiniest amount.

So go ahead and have your beer or your daily glass of white wine. It's just not worth worrying about.

That was quick:

Don't get too comfy, though. Tomorrow some reporter will yell a question at MBS about Saudi oil production and he'll just flash them an enigmatic smile and then walk away. Within an hour oil will be selling for a thousand dollars a barrel or something.

Sunset on the EJ Grizzaffi Bridge crossing the Atchafalaya River in Morgan City, Louisiana.

This is absolutely nuts. Is Putin trying to make the rest of the world hate his guts? Is he going to start bombing kitten and puppy hospitals next?

Here is average household spending on gasoline:

The figures through 2020 come from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. The extrapolation for 2021 is based on retail sales of gasoline, which increased 36% compared to 2020. The extrapolation for 2022 is based on the price of oil, which has increased 70% since the beginning of the year and will likely produce a rise in gasoline prices of about 40% or so.

Long story short, families still aren't spending as much on gasoline as they did during the big oil spikes of 2008 and 2012, but they're getting close and prices are still rising.

3/9 UPDATE: The price of oil plummeted the day after writing this. So maybe prices aren't still rising. Maybe.

Is this cheating? Am I getting a bonus catblogging day by putting up a picture of a random cat that I took a picture of last week? Probably.

This particular cat was up on a roof in a section of town called Orange Park Acres, a little chunk of unincorporated land surrounded by the city of Orange. It's sort of a faux-rural neighborhood with big houses and lots of horses and, I guess, not too many pesky city regulations. But great for cats.

This won't come as big news to readers of this blog, but it's worth posting just for the headline alone:

A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States.

....The researchers calculated that at its worst, people born in the mid-to-late 1960s may have lost up to six IQ points, and children registering the highest levels of lead in their blood, eight times the current minimum level to initiate clinical concern, fared even worse, potentially losing more than seven IQ points on average.

Dropping a few IQ points may seem negligible, but the authors note that these changes are dramatic enough to potentially shift people with below-average cognitive ability (IQ score less than 85) to being classified as having an intellectual disability (IQ score below 70).

The effect of lead on violent crime is a relatively new finding and it's still controversial. The effect of lead on IQ isn't. It's one of the oldest and most widely accepted findings in the literature. There's not much question that leaded gasoline reduced human intelligence worldwide among those born around 1960-1990 or so.

And the researchers are right about the effect, which is similar to the effect on violent crime. For those in the average IQ zone (or the average violence zone) the loss of a few points of IQ isn't that big deal. But the effect of lead is at its peak in poor communities and urban cores, where more people already have below-average IQ and above-average propensities for violence. A difference of six points is the difference between, say, average IQs of 90 and 84. Or, even worse, between average IQs of 80 and 74, with similar levels of change in violent behavior. Those are gigantic differences.

POSTSCRIPT: In a stunning abuse of significant digits, the authors of the paper actually estimated a loss of 824,097,690 IQ points. Uh huh.

In the 2002 presidential election in France, Jacques Chirac ended up in a runoff with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the odious founder of the racist National Front party. Many French voters found themselves in a tough position: not really liking Chirac, but knowing that they couldn't support the loathsome Le Pen.

The French electorate did the right thing, reelecting Chirac by 82%-18%. That much I already knew, but last night I was browsing through some French history and learned that one of Chirac's campaign tactics was to directly acknowledge the extent of conflicted feelings, telling voters that he understood many of them would just be "loaning" him their vote.

I don't really know if this would work in the US, but it was interesting enough that I thought I'd toss it out. If Donald Trump runs in 2024, would Joe Biden win some support by recognizing publicly that he was asking some people to loan him their vote? Would that make it easier for fence-sitters to go ahead and mark their ballots for him?

We won't have Trump to kick around in 2022, but I halfway wonder if this might even be a useful tactic in certain midterm races. Tell moderate Republicans that their party has gone nuts and you're asking for the temporary loan of their vote to send Republican leaders a message.

I suppose there's probably nothing to this. But it was an interesting tidbit that I thought might spark some conversation.