Over the past week I've created a bunch of charts that I vaguely thought I'd use in posts but then never found a real use for. But why waste them? So as a special holiday weekend treat, here are four random charts that weren't good enough to pass the stringent quality control measures we maintain on weekdays.
First up is the value of the Turkish lira:
At the beginning of the year the lira was worth 14 cents. Then it fell, stabilized a bit, fell some more, and then plummeted last week. It's now worth about 7 cents.
This is all due to the peculiar obsession of Turkish president cum strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who believes that low interest rates will bring down inflation. This defies both common sense and all economic theory, and follows in the footsteps of the long history of weird obsessions held by third world quasi dictators. If it were true, it would certainly be of considerable interest to Paul Volcker, who would learn to his chagrin that he could have broken the back of inflation in the 80s a lot more easily than by raising interest rates and engineering a huge recession.
Anyway, this isn't going to turn out well, so let's move on. Here's abortion:
What point was I making here? God knows. What it shows is that the redder a state the more its residents oppose abortion. Big surprise, eh? So here's something you probably didn't know:
How about that? You'd think that when demand for a service increases, the price would go up too. But apparently not, at least in the case of funeral services.
Finally, I remember wondering just how accurate our count of COVID-19 fatalities was. The answer is that it's pretty accurate:
The count of excess deaths is a little higher than the official COVID-19 mortality count, but not by a lot. It seems like we can pretty safely use the official numbers on the assumption that they're pretty accurate.
So there you have it: four random things that maybe you didn't know before but now you do. It's what you come here for.
One might find Florida's divergence surprising, until you realize that while they hate the Communist Castrista Hell in which they grew up, much of that Hell did still sink in favorably, as with the Communist allowing legal abortion.
Not all vote is abortion bub. Democrats had no campaign in 2020 there. It was a corpse. Obviously those predictions were bogus.
Also, West Virginia percentage of strict abortion law has gone down over the last 50 years. 20% swing vote basically for the sale of coal to foreign countries for plastics production. What happened in 2000??? Democrats out anti-plastics in the main party platform. There you go. My guess with Obama in 2008, there was hope he reverse the position on coal and when he didnt, the state when hard red.....but not in spirit, to say Alabama.
Florida somewhat mirrors the country as a whole, politically. That is, it's quite evenly divided (Republicans have done well the last few cycles, but the margins have generally been pretty tight).
So, I don't find it surprising that Florida respondents echo the sentiments of Americans in the aggregate with respect to abortion: AFAIK only a relatively modest portion of country wants the procedure sharply restricted (which is what this question is asking).
Funeral services dropped because of increased volume. Relatively fixed overhead is spread over more customers.
The funeral I had to pay for last year definitely did not adjust their prices to pass along any savings from increased volume lowering their per capita overhead costs. The itemized prices for cremation, embalming, coffins, room rental, death certificates, newspaper announcements, etc remained the same as the year before.
It was more that the funeral home was so busy that they didn’t have time and/or stock to upsell me on anything. The pricey coffins were already gone. The limitation on number of guests to just 12 made the decorative trappings of a big funeral irrelevant. And the needs to get to the next client meant that I had only like 15 minutes to decide on everything before their next appointment was walking in the door.
As a side note: it was the easiest funeral I’ve ever organized (not that I’ve organized many). Fewer choices to make and not feeling like the funeral director was acting like a sleazy car salesman preying on me were definite pluses, along with the entire bill being small enough to put on a single credit card.
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I'd be willing to bet a lot of this reduction is due to greatly increased numbers opting for cremation rather than burial. Also, restrictions on indoor and oudoor gatherings have meant families aren't paying for memorial services in cemetery or funeral parlor facilities, or for graveside/mausoleum services. Just check into phrases like "celebration of life to be announced at a later date."
Also, restrictions on indoor and oudoor gatherings have meant families aren't paying for memorial services in cemetery or funeral parlor facilities,
I bet you're right about that. The downsizing of funerals probably accounts for the drop in prices.
This was definitely my experience too, as noted above and below. I hope this “simple funeral” trend continues after the pandemic dies down, but I’m sure the funeral industry will want to return to upselling everything as soon as the supply chain issues and state restrictions on gatherings go away.
FYI Volcker died just before the pandemic. Not sure if you knew but the sentence reads to me like you thought he was alive.
Good stuff. Thanks, Kevin.
For Turkey and Erdogan is it perhaps worth noting that the actual observed inflation responds to what econometric historical data has always shown, unless off-set by other factors, easy money / low interest rates generates inflation (and raising rates tames). That Erdogan refuses to acknowledge the observed numbers is quite extraordinary. Of course like most crackpot (pity really he did a solid job in his first decade in power), the non-adherence of reality of pet-theory is ascribed to shadowy enemies.
The one thing that may save Turkey from sliding into permanent dictatorship is this - aside from the Islamist hard-core who have ideological blinders on worthy of the Bolsheviks, most people are really rather unhappy about losing 40% of purchasing power in six months or so.
Having had to organize and pay for a funeral at the height of covid last year, funeral service costs went down because a lot of the things you normally might want to purchase for a funeral were irrelevant or out of stock. You had to limit attendees to under 12, so no reason to rent a big room, make a big announcement in the newspaper, buy lots of food, etc. All the more pricey coffins were already gone, so you had to buy a cheaper one that was readily available. And so forth. As several documentaries have shown, the funeral industry is good at turning grief into profit… but during the height of the pandemic, they couldn’t upsell you on a lot of things, and so it’s not shocking that it ate into their profits.
I literally remember looking at a sheet of paper crammed with options and the funeral director going down the page, saying “well we can’t do that because of state restrictions… well we only have a few of those coffins in stock because of the supply chain problems… well our florist is closed right now.” At the end, there were very few optional add-ons left.
I see the value of winning Who Wants to Be a Turkish Millionaire on the Howard Stern Show has dropped even further.
It would be a nice outcome if the "American way of death" became less about status display and more about actual grieving.
Funerals aren't for the dead, they're for the living.
Kevin Drum
Here's a thought for you.
Why not chart out the sheer number of people that have called for the banning of spadesofgrey over the last few weeks?
Or is that just another chart you'd have no use for?