Author: Kevin Drum

Yesterday I showed you the Borromeo Church in the Vienna Central Cemetery and promised a follow-up someday. But there's no time like the present, so here goes.

The cemetery is beautiful and perfectly maintained, as you can see in these two pictures:

The tombstones are laid out with military precision and everything is kept neat and clean. At least, that's the case in the Catholic and Protestant sections of the cemetery. It's a different story in the Jewish section:

When I saw this, I figured it must have something to do with Jewish traditions that I was unfamiliar with. But no. The cemetery originally had two Jewish sections: the older of the two was heavily damaged during the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938 while the newer section survived the war more or less intact. But neither of them was maintained after that because, it turns out, each faith community is responsible for upkeep of its part of the cemetery. This wasn't a problem before World War II, but after the Holocaust there were only a few thousand Jews left in Vienna and they had nowhere near the resources to maintain their sections. Even today there are only about 12,000 Jews in the entire city.

At the same time—and I'm not sure whether to be surprised by this or not—neither the city government nor the national government was willing to offer any help. So the Jewish sections slowly declined over the decades.

Finally, though, in the 1990s Austria began facing up to its Nazi past, and as part of the 2002 "Washington Agreement" that funded restitution for Holocaust survivors and the return of looted art, a fund was set up to restore Jewish cemeteries in Austria. In 2010 work began, and in 2023 plans were drawn up for the Vienna cemetery. The funding is not huge, so it will probably take a while for the Jewish cemetery to be fully restored. But eventually it will finally get its due.

My old Washington Monthly colleague Nick Confessore, now at the New York Times, has a long magazine piece up today about the DEI program at the University of Michigan, one of the oldest and most expansive in the country:

Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.”... Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies.... The English department has adopted a 245-word land acknowledgment, describing its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.”...  Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016.

The big problem is that even after many decades and many millions of dollars, it hasn't accomplished much:

Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion.

....On their private text-messaging group, deans across the university grumbled about the mountains of data they were required to submit each year. Their public progress reports and D.E.I. strategic plans were heavily vetted by the university counsel’s office and Sellers’s team; the resulting public documents, though meant to ensure accountability, were often both lengthy and vague. “No one knew what they were supposed to be doing,” the former dean said. “And no one would tell us. But we had to show that we were doing something.”

....For a large swath of students and professors, Michigan’s D.E.I. initiatives have become simply background noise, like the rote incantations of a state religion.... [But] Michigan has taken the struggles of its D.E.I. program as evidence of the need for more. In 2023, Chavous oversaw the rollout of D.E.I. 2.0. There would be more D.E.I. training, more “antiracism dialogue,” D.E.I. consultants for each university unit, a new raft of subplans and action items.

....Many faculty members I spoke to worried that Michigan’s press to ingrain D.E.I. into their scholarship — the diversity statements, the special fellowships, the clamor for research into contemporary social-justice issues — had narrowed its departments rather than broadening them. Disciplines and historical eras that couldn’t be jammed into an equity framework were being left to wither; even academics from minority backgrounds felt they had to present themselves as scholars of equity in order to advance.

Nor has DEI accomplished its original core purpose of increasing Black enrollment:

The university now has a greater proportion of Hispanic, Asian and first-generation students and a more racially diverse staff. But in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black, the school’s Black undergraduate enrollment has long hovered stubbornly at around 4 percent, before ticking up just past 5 percent this fall.

The whole piece has much, much more. It's long but well worth a read. You might even find yourself surprised by some of it.

The Guardian asked people exiting a Trump rally in Georgia why they were leaving early. Voni Miller said she didn't want to leave, but:

“I’m actually leaving early because my phone is dying and I have a Tesla so I can’t get in. It’s really upsetting, because it meant a lot to be here, and I just can’t get in my car.”

Ah, modern life.

As long as I'm at it, here's a sampling of what Republicans think about various things according to YouGov:

It's vibes all the way down.

While we're posting results from this week's YouGov poll, here's one that's crackers:

60% of Republicans say they're worse off than a year ago even though the economy has boomed over the past 12 months:

• The prime age labor force participation rate is up 0.3 points to the highest level in 20 years
• Real GDP per capita is up 2.5%
• Real wages are up 1.5%
• Savings are up 5.7%
• Inflation is down 1.3 percentage points to 2.4%
• Real spending per person is up $1,100

At a guess, I'd say that no more than 10% of the population is worse off financially than they were a year ago. But 60% of Republicans think they are thanks to Fox News.

Same ol', same ol':

Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts about Donald Trump's sit-down at the Economic Club of Chicago with Bloomberg editor John Micklethwait. The full thing is on YouTube here.

Near the beginning Trump spent what seemed like forever telling a "sir" story about a friend named John who builds auto plants and is currently building the world's biggest auto plant in Mexico. John supposedly told Trump a few days ago that the project had been abandoned because the owners were afraid Trump would win the election and put big tariffs on cars from Mexico.

Oddly, this story has a kernel of truth, but the friend's name is Elon, not John. Tesla had plans to build a factory in Monterrey that would produce a million cars a year, placing it among the world's biggest. But a few months ago Elon Musk said it was "on hold" because of concern over possible Trump tariffs.

This may or may not be the real reason for the pause. It certainly makes no sense since Trump can't raise tariffs on Mexican cars no matter how much he wants to. This is for the obvious reason that trade with Mexico is governed by the USMCA (aka "NAFTA 2.0"), which Trump called "the single greatest agreement ever signed" after he negotiated it. It went into effect in 2020.

After talking a bit more about tariffs, his "favorite word in the dictionary," Trump decided to go directly after Micklethwait, a longtime proponent of free trade: "It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong." Uh huh.

Trump defended tariffs by reference to the steel tariffs he levied on China and other countries. "We saved our steel," he said. But if you look at the numbers since then, overall steel imports have gone up and domestic production has gone down:

Economics then had to take a back seat as Trump once again claimed that before he was president South Korea paid nothing to support the US military presence there. He says he demanded $5 billion and settled for $2 billion. "I got $2 billion for nothing." But then lamebrain Joe Biden caved in and let the payments lapse.

This is fantasy. The US has had a cost sharing agreement with South Korea since 1991. In 2017 it amounted to about $860 million. South Korea agreed to increase that to $930 million in 2019, but after that negotiations broke down because Trump did indeed demand $5 billion. So he got nothing. It was left to President Biden to negotiate a new deal at $1.02 billion with automatic annual increases.

South Korea pays other US defense expenses too, notably including about $10 billion toward the construction of a new Camp Humphreys 40 miles south of Seoul. It is the largest overseas US military base in the world.

Micklethwait struggled manfully to keep Trump on topic, and seemed slightly relieved when Trump was willing to address the issue of the dollar as a reserve currency. Hey, it's an economic topic, at least. "If you want to go to third world status," Trump warned, "lose your reserve currency."

Unfortunately, Trump didn't seem to know what it even meant to be a reserve currency. He talked repeatedly about countries saying they would "no longer be in the reserve currency," which makes no sense. Nobody is in or out of a reserve currency. It's just a matter of a currency being viewed as strong and safe and therefore worth holding and worth paying your bills in. The world has several already. The dollar is the biggest, but the yen, the euro, and the pound are all reserve currencies too.

In any case, Trump naturally insisted that Joe Biden was a moron who was tossing away the dollar's reserve status. He seems not to realize that the dollar got weaker on his watch and stronger under Biden:

Trump also complained that Fed chair Jerome Powell kept interest rates too high while he was president—until Trump threatened to fire him. That scared him so much he cut rates immediately. In fact, "he dropped them too much."

This is nuts. Even in 2019, when the economy was running hot, interest rates were always below 2.5%. Late in the year they were lowered moderately, but it was only after the pandemic started that they went to zero—as they certainly should have.

Then Micklethwait made the mistake of asking Trump precisely what he'd do to cut waste in the government. It probably seemed like a nice, concrete question, but Trump wouldn't answer. Instead he took the opportunity to yet again brag about how he saved $1.7 billion dollars almost overnight on a new pair of Air Force Ones. All he had to was call the CEO of Boeing and ask, something that no one before him had ever thought to do.

This is yet another Trump fantasy. He played no role in negotiating the Boeing contract, which ended up where everyone always thought it would. But no one ever challenges him, so he keeps repeating this tall tale every chance he gets.

On the subject of fantasies, Trump also insisted that he gave Apple a break on tariffs but only if they started manufacturing in the US. And they did! They opened a factory in Austin to make Mac Pros.

Except for one little detail: that factory opened in 2013, long before Trump was around. But he's been taking credit for it anyway since 2019.

After it was all over and Trump had done nothing but repeat his usual lies and demonstrate that he knows nothing about the economy, his fans at Fox News immediately began marveling at Trump's masterful performance in schooling Micklethwait. Why, Trump's command of economics was so overwhelming the poor guy never stood a chance. Seriously, they said that. It's a case study in toadying unrivaled in recent history.

How much do you pay for milk? On average it's about four bucks a gallon right now. But why? Whether you like it or not, I'm about to tell you.

The federal government sets the price farmers get for milk. But not nationally. Of course not. There are 11 regional FMMOs in the United States—Federal Milk Marketing Orders—and they all set their own price for milk:

For the rest of this we're going to ignore the regions and use a national average. But it's just an average. Here's the way prices are set.

First, the USDA surveys distributors every month to get their wholesale prices. But they don't want the price of milk itself. Oh no. They want the price of four components: butter, nonfat dry milk, cheese, and dry whey. Here's the formula that eventually turns this into a price for whole milk:

Got that? No? Let's break it down using the latest survey prices for September. Here's step 1:

Step 2: The USDA calculates the "make allowance" for each commodity. This is the production cost to make each commodity from milk. For example, the cost to make butter from milk is set at $0.1715 per pound. Subtract this from the price of butter and you get a net price of $2.98 per pound of butter.

Step 3: Calculate the yield of each commodity. For example, it takes 1.211 pounds of butter to make one pound of butterfat. Multiply this out and the price of butterfat is $3.61 per pound.

Step 4: Are we done yet? By no means. Next we have to calculate how much of each component is in milk. For example, it turns out that whole milk is 3.5% butterfat, so a pound of milk needs only $0.1262 worth of butterfat. Multiply this by 100 because milk is measured in hundredweights and you get a factor of 3.5 and a final component price of butterfat of $12.62 for a hundredweight of milk.

Step 5: We could now set a whole milk price, but that would be too easy. Instead we calculate the price of Class III skim milk (protein + other solids) and Class IV skim milk (dry whey). Then we average them and add 74¢:

Step 6: Almost done! But first we have to multiply by 0.965 because that's how much skim milk you get from a hundredweight of whole milk.

Step 7: Finally we add in the butterfat we left out of the skim milk price:

Ta da! The farm gate price for whole milk is $23.46 per hundredweight. Approximately. I left out a bit of extra complexity in the protein price and also skipped the somatic cell adjustment rate, currently $0.00114 per thousand cells. So the actual price for Class I whole milk—i.e., milk meant for drinking—is a few cents higher.

And there's more! As I said before, this is a base national price. Each region throughout the US tacks on a "differential" for Class I milk:

These differentials range from $1.60 per hundredweight in the upper Midwest to $6 in Florida and affect local prices of milk

So what does this all mean to you? As this chart shows, the average retail price of milk across the US closely follows the USDA price:

The average farm price for milk this year has been about $22 per hundredweight. There are 11.6 gallons in a hundredweight, so that comes to $1.90 per gallon. The rest of the retail price comes from distribution, processing, packaging, markups, and the regional price differentials.

Now you might wonder: if the USDA price is based on surveys to determine component prices, why go through all this rigamarole? Why not just survey milk prices and be done with it? And if, in the end, they're just setting prices based on what actual prices are, why bother with any of this?

That I don't know. The whole thing started during the New Deal and it's held on ever since with periodic refinements along the way (most recently in 2018). It probably has something to do with pooling and smoothing prices for farmers, but that's just a guess. It all seems kind of wacky to me.

It looks to me like the comet is getting fainter every night, so I guess I've done all the comet photography I'm going to do.

This is the Borromeo Church, a Jugendstil (art nouveau) classic at the center of the Zentralfriedhof, the Vienna Central Cemetery. The cemetery is the final resting place of Beethoven, among others, and also home to a rare European hamster. It's one of the world's largest at 3 million interred, and is divided into separate sections for Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. More about that later.

The press is finally starting to ask the most obvious question in the world:

This is from the Washington Post, and it follows a major story on the same theme last week in the New York Times. The taboo is finally lifting.