Author: Kevin Drum

Today New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked JD Vance over and over and over whether he believed Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Naturally he refused to answer:

Vance's refusal to answer doesn't really bug me. Whatever. What does bug me is his smug cleverness in pretending that the real issue is that the media massively censored news of Hunter Biden's laptop and "analysts" think this cost Trump millions of votes.

I know JD doesn't care, but for the millionth time there was no censorship. Twitter took down links to the story for about 24 hours. Facebook limited distribution a little bit. The mainstream media all wrote about it, but only after they could confirm the story—which Rudy Giuliani deliberately made difficult by withholding the evidence he claimed to have.

That's it. That's the massive censorship. It never happened.

What's going on with Truth Social stock? It was steadily declining and then abruptly turned around on September 24. What happened on September 24 to suddenly rekindle the hopes of the faithful?

Behold the top of the New York Times front page at this moment in time:

It's not that all the Trump stories are positive. They aren't. It's that Trump is allowed to set the agenda for political coverage almost single-handedly. Do they even know they're doing it? I wonder sometimes. It's like Steve Jobs's infamous reality distortion field: you get sucked in whether you want to or not. That's Trump and the media these days.

How's that $20 minimum wage for fast food workers working out in California? Today Michael Hiltzik points to a couple of new studies that have some early data.

Both conclude, unsurprisingly, that wages have gone up for fast food workers. But what about prices and employment?

The first study, from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at Berkeley, says the law increased prices to consumers by 3.7%—or about 50 cents for an average burger & fries combo.

On employment, unfortunately, the report seems to have misidentified its own data. It compares California employment to US employment and says that starting in 2024 "California fast food employment begins to grow faster than U.S. fast food employment." But their own chart shows just the opposite. Here's a clearer take on the data:

California employment in fast food relative to the US has been declining since the start of 2023. As it happens, though, the report's overall conclusion of no effect is probably correct anyway: the decline is relatively steady and nothing special happened when the $20 wage took effect. On the other hand, there is a drop from April to June, equal to about 10,000 workers. It's possible this is due to the new law taking effect, though it looks mostly like noise to me. Time will tell.

The second study comes from the Harvard Kennedy School, but it relies on a self-selected sample from Facebook and Instagram. Based on their latest wave of survey results they conclude that average hours worked hasn't changed, but they have no way of estimating total employment. So it's of limited use.

Nickel summary: California's $20 fast food law raised wages considerably and prices a little bit. It probably had no effect on employment, but it's too soon to tell. There might have been a small effect.

Poor Charlie. He brushed up against a thorn or something and opened up a wound on his back leg. Naturally he wants to lick it to death, so he's confined to the cone for a while.

Charlie is weirdly afraid of the camera now that he has the cone on. I don't know why. In particular, he recoils at the sound of the shutter, which really doesn't make sense. But you can see in this picture that he's suspicious even before the shutter goes off.

Tyler Cowen asks today, "Why are fewer men going to college?" This is a common belief, but it's really a myth. Male enrollment in college has been stable for the past 30 years:

It's true that the number of women enrolling in college has gone up substantially during this period. It's also true that male enrollment is generally lower here than it is overseas (though women outnumber men everywhere).

But it's not true that fewer men are going to college. It's the same as it's ever been.

Mehdi Hasan tweets about the conservative retreat from reality:

I did @bbcquestiontime with a live audience including Trump voters in Philly this week. The Trump voters booed and laughed sarcastically at every official statistic mentioned from the stage: unemployment, inflation, even Border Patrol stats on border crossings. They don’t believe anything. It’s scary. And dangerous for the country.

Hasan was responding to an Atlantic article by Charlie Warzel about the insane misinformation surrounding the recent hurricanes:

It’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.

....Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

Needless to say, I have no general disagreement with either Hasan or Warzel. And yet, I still wonder: has this kind of behavior really increased or is it simply more visible thanks to Twitter and other social media?

I can't figure out a way to test this. I'm not talking about garden variety conspiracy theories here—JFK, 9/11, the 2020 election—I'm talking about the flat-out insane stuff. Faked moon landing. Mena airfield. Bogus national statistics. Has there been a rise in the number of people who are, as Warzel puts it, dissociated from reality?

Maybe someday I'll figure out some clever way to test this. In the meantime, though, I came across a surprising and weird related thing. If you look at polls of trust in government, Democrats act fairly normally: they generally trust Democratic presidents more than Republican presidents. But here's Republican trust in government over the years:

Republican trust in government routinely falls off a cliff at the end of Republican presidencies. This starts before election years and before Democrats are elected. Generally speaking, their trust in government doesn't fall during Democratic presidencies. It falls, apparently, after one of their own has been in office a few years and betrayed them by not delivering what they wanted.

It's possible this is a coincidence. Both Bushes ended their presidencies with recessions and Trump ended his with COVID. Maybe it's bad luck. But I wonder. And I wonder if it's related to periodic outbreaks of conservative insanity?

NOTE: Obviously this doesn't explain what's happening right now at the end of a Democratic presidency. Nor does it offer much insight into whether our current insanity is actually normal but simply more visible than before. But it's still interesting, no?

It looks like the market has rendered a verdict on Elon Musk's big cybertaxi announcement last night:

Musk told the audience that anyone who didn't believe in Tesla's driverless future shouldn't be an investor in the company. It looks like they took him at his word. It's just the usual Musk vaporware, same as always.

As usual, if you really want to judge where autonomous car technology is, look to Waymo. They've (finally!) started broad testing on freeways, and you can legit set a Waymo car on its way and then take a nap while it drives you around. I don't think they'll quite make my forecast of a real driverless car on sale to the public by 2025, but it will be close.

The Wall Street Journal reports that not only is inflation under control, in some areas prices are actually dropping:

Businesses that sell a range of products from IKEA sofas to Air Jordan sneakers have said in recent weeks that they have lowered prices this year. In part, that is because many companies increased prices rapidly in preceding years when supply chain and labor costs rose, and flush consumers were willing to pay more.

This is not really news: the price of durable goods has been going down for more than a year:

Durable goods (like Ikea furniture) today cost 2.9% less than a year ago. Nondurable goods (like Nike sneakers) are down 0.7%.

The flip side is that inflation in services, which is more sensitive to labor costs, is still running at 4.7%. It's continuing to come down, but slowly.

Here is Donald Trump tonight, rambling about Elon Musk's reusable rockets:

And they're coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace with a circle. Boom. It reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He'd have eight circles and he couldn't fill them up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.

OK, I give up. Biden's eight circles? wtf is he talking about?