Author: Kevin Drum

According to the Wall Street Journal, inflation in the eurozone is "likely" to hit a new record in November:

Just eyeballing this chart suggests that our own surge in inflation is perhaps half due to global problems and half due to specific US issues. The obvious candidate for the former is supply chain disruptions and the sudden switch in demand from services to goods, while the obvious candidate for the latter is the $3 trillion in stimulus money that we pumped into our economy at the beginning of 2021. I expect that both of these things will begin to ease off starting in early 2022.

The LA Times writes today about a surge of violent crime on buses and subways:

Crime on L.A. trains, buses rises as riders return: ‘Poor people are suffering the most

On the Los Angeles public transit system — where ridership has rebounded to about 843,000 weekday daily riders from a pandemic low of about 363,800 — normal has also brought with it a rise in crime.

In 2021, through September, reports of violent crimes were up 25% from the same time last year and 9% from 2019, according to L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority data.

It sounds as if ridership has increased 132% while violent crime has increased only 25%. That would be pretty good, wouldn't it?

But no. The ridership numbers compare ridership now with the lowest month of the pandemic. In fact, ridership through the first three quarters of the year is just about identical from 2020 to 2021, which means that a rise in crime really is a rise in crime:

This is for all Part 1 (serious) crimes, not just violent crimes. Why couldn't the LA Times just say this instead of presenting us with pointless absolute numbers and useless ridership comparisons?

POSTSCRIPT: Ridership here. Crime from 2009-2018 here. Crime from 2019-2021 here.

The recently discovered Omicron variation of the COVID-19 virus provides us with two immediate options:

• Calm down and wait for the epidemiologists to tell us just how dangerous it is.
• Start the countermeasures now before exponential growth has a chance to really get exponential.

These are both bits of advice I've been hearing from people I trust to have reasonable opinions, but they are diametrically opposed to each other. What's the answer?

Thanks to the miracle of automation, holiday weekends don't stop Kaiser Permanente from letting me know about my latest health status:

This is still high, but steady from last month, which means my multiple myeloma continues to be under control.

On the less bright side, my immune system seems to be bouncing around all over the place. My chemo meds are on a schedule of 21 days on and 7 days off, and normally we do labs during the off week. However, my doctor wanted to do a mid-cycle set of labs this time, and they showed my immune system in excellent shape. Then, a week later, I did the normally scheduled set of labs and it showed the worst case of neutropenia I can remember. Very weird. Neutrophil levels always go up and down based on chemo schedules, but this is much more than normal.

In my case, none of this seems to affect my actual immunity to diseases, which is good, but neutropenia does make me tired. So this explains why I've been sleeping about 14 hours a day this week. When I restart the chemo we might cut the dose in half if my neutrophil levels continue to be weak, and in a couple of weeks I have an appointment with my oncologist to discuss all this.

In case this has left you confused, the nutshell version is that things are basically OK, but we're going through a period of instability. This has happened before, and as in previous cases it will eventually either settle down or else lead to a new chemo med. In the meantime, no real worries.

It is Hilbert's turn for catblogging this week, but it's difficult to get a proper picture of him these days. Charlie follows him around everywhere, something that Hilbert is only slowly getting used to. In any case, here is Hilbert in the sewing room being photobombed.

A few months ago I was roaming around one of the semi-rural areas of Orange County (i.e., zoned for horses and other critters) and took a bunch of pictures of some turkeys. They were mostly pretty meh except for this one, which highlighted the concentric rings on this handsome bird. Gobble gobble.

I hope you all have a nice Thanksgiving. At least for a day, just relax and ignore the imminent end of civilization as we know it, OK?

This is a large neon artwork celebrating booze at the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles. If anybody can provide some background about what inspired it, let us all know in comments.

All three men involved in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery have been found guilty. All things considered, this has not been a bad week for the criminal justice system.

Household spending regained its pre-pandemic level earlier this year and has continued to grow since then at about the same rate as it did before the pandemic. Adjusted for inflation, spending was up 0.7% in October compared to September:

The news is not so cheery on the income front. Adjusted for inflation, personal income has been declining since July and declined again in October by -0.3% compared to September:

How long can spending hold up if income is declining? That all depends on whether households still have savings stashed away from all the stimulus bills. But they don't:

My prediction: With savings back to normal and real income declining, spending is going to flatten out too. This might not happen until after the holidays, but unless something changes I suspect January will be the start of a pullback among consumers. Supply chain problems will be largely under control by then too, which suggests to me that inflation will also start coming down.

This is just my layman's guess, of course. We'll see.

In the New York Times today, Rogé Karma fills in for new dad Ezra Klein by interviewing sociologist Patrick Sharkey about crime and what we can do about it. Here's the introduction:

In 2020 the United States experienced a nearly 30 percent rise in homicides from 2019. That’s the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records in 1960. And violence has continued to rise well into 2021.

To deny or downplay the seriousness of this spike is neither morally justified nor politically wise. Violence takes lives, traumatizes children, instills fear, destroys community life and entrenches racial and economic inequality....Liberals and progressives need an answer to the question of how to handle rising violence.

This language is a little fuzzy, so I just want to remind everyone that the real mystery has to do not with murder and violent crime, but with murder versus violent crime:

As you can see, for 30 years the murder and violent crime rates have changed almost precisely in unison. Then, in 2020, they suddenly diverged. The big question, then, is why did murder rates spike so high even though the overall violent crime rate remained steady?

This is not the topic of the interview, which is about how we can reduce urban violence via methods other than policing. It's very much worth reading, but it's also worth keeping in mind that overall violence hasn't changed much over the past decade. Only the murder rate has. This is something that deserves some careful study.