Author: Kevin Drum

NGFS—the Network for Greening the Financial System—is a group of all the world's central banks that tries to estimate the macroeconomic effects of climate change. They published their latest report this week, and it's grim:

This is the "current policy" projection, and they estimate that global GDP in 2050 will be 15% lower than it would be if there were no climate change. That's only 25 years away.

Note that this is not a bunch of lefty enviro rabble rousers. It's central bankers, normally a fairly sober lot. But like insurance companies and the military, they're starting to get pretty worried.

Still, probably not much will be done. Here are the regional effects of climate change from the study that underpinned the NGFS report:

The effects of climate change are mostly felt in poor areas like South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and China. Europe and the US are affected only modestly. So hurricanes and wildfires will continue to get our attention, but the major damage will be just another headline on page 13 about flooding in Bangladesh or famine in Africa. Out of sight, out of mind.

I saw my oncologist yesterday and officially discontinued the Talvey. The new plan is to try a similar but different bispecific called Tecvayli that targets CD3 and BCMA instead of CD3 and GPRC5D. In theory this should be less effective since I've already had a BCMA treatment, but in practice it seems to work well even so.

Tecvayli has all the usual side effects—CRS, fatigue, immune system degradation—but it doesn't affect the mouth or taste buds. I'm going to wait a month for all my Talvey side effects to (hopefully) go away, and then start Tecvayli in early December. This means another hospital stay while they ramp up the dose and watch for neurological problems, but at least it's only a week this time around. And neither the CAR-T nor the Talvey produced even a hint of neuro side effects, so I'm optimistic that Tecvayli won't either.

Fingers crossed.

A contingent job is one that's not expected to be permanent. It does not include independent contractors, on-call workers, temp agency workers, or workers provided by contract firms.

Anyway, every once once in a great while the BLS measures this, and their first report in six years dropped today. After such a long wait I'm sure you're eager to see the results:

This is the first significant increase ever, and it's not clear why. More side hustles? More gig workers? Straggling effects from the pandemic? Hard to say. Still, the increase amounts to only 800,000 workers out of 160 million, so it's probably not a big deal in any case.

Say hello to Edgar. He lives down the street but roams the near neighborhood and occasionally comes by to visit us. He's a pretty sociable cat.

However, Hilbert isn't. Neither is Charlie. As you can see in the bottom picture, with his arched back and bushy tail, Hilbert is none too pleased with Edgar's visit. Oddly, Edgar himself didn't react at all. He just sat there calmly while Hilbert and Charlie (outside the frame) hissed at him.

China makes about 90% of the shoes worn in America. Donald Trump's tariffs could end that:

The American shoe company Steven Madden will cut nearly half of its China production within the next year as it braces for tariffs under a second Trump administration.

....[CEO Edward] Rosenfeld said on Thursday that Steven Madden had been working for several years to build up a factory base outside China in places like Cambodia, Vietnam, Brazil and Mexico.

Even if Trump follows through, it won't benefit American shoemakers. There aren't any. We'll still import all our shoes, we'll just import them from other countries.

Will China retaliate if Trump raises tariffs? Maybe, but their leverage is limited. We don't export much to them, and their only truly strategic exports to us are pharmaceuticals and rare earth metals. Restricting those could do real damage, but even that would be temporary. Pharmaceuticals would migrate to India or other countries that already have good supply chains, and there are plenty of rare earths outside China. We just have to build the mines to get at them.

Of course, China also sells us lots of consumer goods that may not be strategic but will suddenly cost more if they're hit by big tariffs. Nobody seemed to care much about it during Trump's first round of tariffs, but that might be because the impact was swamped first by the pandemic and then the broader surge of inflation. It might be different this time. We'll see.

It's been a while since we looked at rising medical costs. Here's the latest:

Medical costs surged in the early '80s, but steadily came down over the next 20 years. Since 2000, medical inflation has been fairly well controlled, averaging about one percentage point higher than overall inflation.

More recently, medical care wasn't affected by the post-pandemic surge in prices. So medical inflation has been well under the overall rate of inflation. As a result, net medical inflation over the past dozen years has matched overall inflation exactly. They're both up 39% since 2012.

Here's an interesting chart from the Financial Times that shows how well governing parties have done in elections through the years:

The point of this chart is supposed to be that, for the first time ever, governing parties have lost every single election so far in 2024. People all over the globe wanted to throw the bums out, and they did. Kamala Harris was just an unfortunate victim of an unstoppable force.

Fair enough. But something else caught my eye. Take a look at the Great Depression of the 1930s. Governing parties were about 50-50. For the next fifty years, nothing. Then look at the big recession of the early '80s. It didn't have a huge effect, but governing parties clearly lost more than they won.

But the recession of the early '90s? Big effect. The Great Recession of 2008-09? An even bigger effect. And 2024 is the biggest effect of all.

What this seems to show is that in the past voters didn't especially punish governing parties for the state of the economy. But for the past 30 years they have. This is a small sample size, but still intriguing. If bad economies have spelled doom for governing parties only recently, why the change?

Over at Mother Jones, my old colleague Mike Mechanic says the reason for voter discontent is more fundamental than most pundits think:

I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest:

Wealth inequality.

There is little that leaves people as pissed off and frustrated as the feeling that no matter how hard they work, they can’t ever seem to get ahead. And this feeling has been slowly festering since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and his cadre of supply-side economists launched the first salvos in what would become the great fucking-over of the American middle and working classes.

The frustration was evident in something two very different women in two very different states told me on the very same day in 2022 for a story on how America spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year subsidizing retirement plans mostly for rich people: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”

This is kind of maddening. My heart is with Mike, but my head has a hard time following. It's absolutely true that wealth inequality has increased over the past few decades. According to the Federal Reserve, the wealth difference of the top 10% compared to the working class was 33:1 in 1989. Today it's 41:1

And yet, that doesn't mean the working class is taking it in the shorts. Ditto for those at retirement age:

Adjusted for inflation, the median wealth of the working class has gone up 93% since 1989. That's not as good as the rich, and it hasn't quite kept up with economic growth. Still, it's nearly double.

As for retirement, I can't find wealth figures just for working class retirees, but median wealth for middle class retirees has gone up 129%.

I just don't know who's right here. I know very well that some people are struggling, and some people really do have to keep working longer than they want to. But how many? Simple, reliable data suggests that the working class is doing well, if not spectacularly, and that most people can still retire at age 65 if they want to.¹ What's more, although workers have gotten more pessimistic about retirement, actual retirees are almost all pretty satisfied:

It seems indisputable that lots of working class folks are unhappy about something, but the objective data doesn't give much of a clue about what it might be. Feel free to take your best guess in comments.

¹There's a PhD assignment here for some enterprising grad student. We know for sure that more people are working past 65, but a lot of this is by choice. Nobody has done any work to find out how many elderly people are working longer involuntarily. Somebody should do that and try to figure out if it's changed over time.

Here's a happier picture to make up for yesterday. It's a farmer (?) waving to us on the boat with a big smile on his face.

Why did Kamala Harris lose? Everyone knows the answer:

• Inflation.
• Refusal to break with an unpopular Biden.
• Too little appeal to the working class.
• Too woke.
• Press was derelict in warning the country about the danger of Trump.
• Gaza.
• Supporting biological trans boys in girls' sports.
• Liz Cheney.
• Avoiding media interviews for first month.
• Immigration.
• Latino men.
• Tidal wave of disinformation.
• Misogyny.
• Prosecuting Trump galvanized the GOP base.
• Too much flip flopping on fracking etc.
• Identity politics.
• Biden stayed in race too long.
• Keeping Jen O'Malley Dillon as campaign manager.
• Coronated too quickly with no public input.
• "Joy."
• "Fascist."
• Biden stimulus.
• Failure to go on Joe Rogan's podcast.
• Too lefty.
• Too centrist.
• Elon Musk.
• Laughed too much.
• Picking Tim Walz for VP instead of Josh Shapiro.
• No Sister Souljah moment.

Phew. It's a miracle she managed to get any electoral votes at all.