Author: Kevin Drum

I received this email after writing about the high cost of deregulated power in Texas yesterday, and thought I'd pass it along without comment. Here it is:

I've worked in utilities on the regulated side of the fence for over two decades now. I have never seen a retail provider that provides a better price than the local distribution utility. Never. It is a massive rip-off of epic proportions and they prey mainly on the poor.

These retail providers also have massive clout in state legislatures and utility boards and work hard to get regulations passed which benefit them even more. Regulated utilities then have to incorporate these regulations into their systems which increases their complexity and overhead. Those costs get passed on to the regulated utility's customers. It's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but not only do retail energy providers screw over their own customers, they also screw over the regulated utility's customers too!

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 24. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Steve Benen passes along the news that Republicans are starting to offer up deals for raising the minimum wage. Senators Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton, for example, say they'd support a minimum wage hike to $10 per hour in return for Democrats supporting a federal requirement that all businesses use the E-Verify system to prevent the hiring of undocumented workers. But Steve doesn't think this offer has much of a chance:

This isn't likely to go anywhere. For one thing, a phased-in increase to $10 per hour is clearly short of Democratic goals....What's more, while Democrats have voiced broad skepticism about the use of E-verify, they're open to the possibility of expanding its use, but only as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package.

I wouldn't accept this offer as is. I'd like to see the minimum wage rise to $12 or so, which would put it at 50% of the median wage. And although I'm a fan of E-Verify, it needs to have some safeguards built around it, along with adequate funding to keep it working properly.

But if those turned out to be negotiable items, I'd be all in favor. Not only would it get the minimum wage up to a decent level, but it would start us down a road in which border security is aimed primarily at American employers, not immigrants themselves. This would be a huge improvement over the current dehumanizing approach.

In fact, if E-Verify were properly implemented, we could eventually shut down ICE and the Border Patrol altogether. If employers can be prevented from hiring undocumented workers, the flow of immigrants across the border will slow to a trickle with almost no effort at all. They come to the US for jobs, after all, and if there are no jobs they'll stop coming.

I have my doubts that Republicans are open to negotiating a decent version of the Romney/Cotton proposal, but you never know. It would be worth a try.

What's this? Some lonely palm trees on an uninhabited desert isle? Nope. It's some lonely palm trees at Sunset Beach in Southern California. A cluster of three palms has been planted at the end of each road that leads to the beach, and this is one of them.

Two decades ago Texas deregulated its power sector and required 60% of its residents to buy electricity from a retail power company. The other 40% stuck with traditional local utilities. The Wall Street Journal shows us the results:

According to the Journal, retail customers have paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities:

From 2004 through 2019, the annual rate for electricity from Texas’s traditional utilities was 8% lower, on average, than the nationwide average rate, while the rates of retail providers averaged 13% higher than the nationwide rate, according to the Journal’s analysis.

The Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, a group that buys electricity for local government use, produced similar findings in a study of the state’s power markets and concluded that high statewide prices relative to the national average “must be attributed to the deregulated sector of Texas.”

So what happens now? Probably nothing. In Texas, deregulation is something like a religion: it works by definition, even if it doesn't work. Just give it another 20 years and you'll see.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 23. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This picture is three years old, and I need to either post it or spike it. But who among us would have the nerve to spike a picture of their beloved spouse? Not me. So here it is, a photo of Marian taken in the rear view mirror on a trip up to Yosemite.

Julian Sanchez offers up some sage advice:

The best thing legislators can do if they want private entities to combat misinformation is *stay out of it*, because those entities have much broader latitude to police misinformation than the government does. https://t.co/LO3Yy8b1GC

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) February 23, 2021

There's more to it than this, though. It's certainly true that any government effort to police Facebook's content is almost certain to be overturned by the Supreme Court and is therefore pointless. But it's also true that we shouldn't want the government to police Facebook.

My standard for this is simple: Whatever it is you want regulated on Facebook, would you also want the same thing regulated on CNN or the Washington Post? Why not? Speech is speech, after all, regardless of whether it's in print, pixels, or modulated carrier waves on a cable system.

(Private action, of course, is entirely different. We should all feel free to campaign against Facebook in any way we please. Public pressure is a great way to push media outlets to change the way they operate.)

I'm annoyed that I continually find myself defending Facebook these days. I'm hardly a big fan, but my objections—which now seem practically stodgy—have always revolved around their incessant disrespect for personal privacy. More recently, though, the criticism of Facebook (and other social media platforms) has revolved around content, and I'm a lot less comfortable with that.

Partly this is because I remain an old-school liberal who believes in free speech. There are limits, as with everything, but those limits should be pretty loose.

But it's also partly because I think we've all gone slightly bonkers over our view of Facebook's power. I've spent a fair amount of time researching this, and it turns out there's very little evidence that Facebook actually influences public opinion all that much. There are several reasons for this:

• Surveys show that lots of people get (some of) their news from Facebook, but only a small fraction of that is political news. The vast majority of it is sports or gossip or cute animals.
• As we all know, Facebook users are very siloed. Is there a lot of conservative misinformation on Facebook? Sure. But it mostly gets read by folks who are already true believers.
• There's also positive news on Facebook. In 2020, for example, Facebook was instrumental in getting people out to vote. If you weigh this against the misinformation, it comes out close to even.

There's a ton of research suggesting that social media usage is correlated with depression or loneliness or whatnot. But there's precious little to show that it's correlated with an increase in conservative misinformation. It might be! But so far there's just not much hard evidence to back this up.

So sure, keep pressuring Facebook to do the right thing. Pressure the Biden administration to crack down on Facebook mergers. (It's big enough to deserve a very hard look if it tries to merge or buy a related company.) But until there's better evidence, ease up on the "criticism" that Facebook makes it easier for people to meet in groups or pass along gossip. There have always been good groups and bad groups, just as there's always been good gossip and bad gossip. Facebook really hasn't changed that very much.

We are fond of polls showing that liberals have a better grasp on reality than conservatives. But it's not always the case. Matt Yglesias points us today to this poll from the Skeptic Research Center:

According to the Washington Post's Fatal Force Database, the correct answer was 13 in 2019. That includes only Black men killed by guns, so the broader answer might be 20-30.

In any case, conservatives clearly have a much closer estimate than liberals. What's more, there are far fewer conservatives than the 10-20% of liberals who think the correct answer is 10,000 (!) or more.

These kinds of polls should always be taken with a shaker of salt. The answers rarely depend on actual knowledge—how many people have the slightest idea how many unarmed Black men are killed by cops each year?—and instead represent little more than guesses based on ideology. If the correct answer is a liberal one, then liberals do better. If the correct answer is a conservative one, conservatives do better. Most of the time, that's all there is to it.

As you're undoubtedly aware, the United States passed the 500,000 death mark from COVID-19 yesterday. This prompted a spate of pieces trying to put this in context. Laid end to end it's enough people to reach from San Diego to San Francisco. It's more than the number of people buried at Arlington Cemetery. It's enough to fill 25 Olympic-size swimming pools.¹ Etc.

I have never found these kinds of comparisons helpful. However, perhaps because I'm fairly nerdish, this one is:

Over the past few weeks, we have recorded about 40% more deaths than we normally would. On average, since the pandemic started, our death rate has increased by 20%.

In other words, if the normal death rate in a nursing home of 200 patients is, say, five per week, it's now six per week. During COVID-19 spikes, it's seven per week. Week after week after week.

¹Author's calculations for all of these.