Despite these initiatives, the tech industry’s demographics remain largely stagnant. In 2022, 26 percent of science, tech, engineering and math workers were women, an increase of one percentage point from the year 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
It's actually a lot worse than that. Here's the share of women specifically in computer related jobs:
Despite decades of DEI programs, the share of women in computer-related jobs has plummeted. The share getting bachelor's degrees in computer science has rebounded a bit over the past decade but is still well below its level in 1990.
Conservative attacks on DEI may have triggered the recent corporate surrender on these programs, but only because the timing was good. After years and years of trying every new thing and seeing only meager results, even a lot of liberals are in a mood to move on. It's one thing to put in the work and tolerate a certain amount of performative BS if you're making progress, but if you're not it's hard to justify. Eventually, after many years of being told "You're doing it wrong," there comes a time when the excuse wears thin.
This particular story is largely about women in IT, but I imagine things are pretty similar for other marginalized groups. We're not making much progress and everyone is running out of patience. If everything we've tried is doing it wrong, then what's right?
Here's a pair of pictures of the River Princess, our cruise ship on the Danube. They were both taken near sunset from a bridge that crossed the river right next to our mooring.
A while back I mentioned that there's no such thing as "immaculate inflation reduction." That is, the Fed doesn't magically bring inflation down with interest hikes. It slows the economy with interest rate hikes, and the slowing economy then brings down inflation. But the economy hasn't slowed recently, which means the Fed wasn't responsible for inflation going down.
But! Maybe the Fed did slow down the economy. Maybe the economy would have run even hotter if the Fed hadn't acted.
Maybe. But here's a remarkable chart that you don't see very often:
Potential GDP is the CBO's estimate of what GDP could be if the economy were running flat out. Obviously it's not sustainable for the economy to run above that for very long, but it's possible for limited periods. Check out the recent times when this briefly happened:
2000, at the tail end of the dotcom boom.
2006-08, the tail end of the housing boom.
2019, the tail end of the Obama-Trump expansion.
2023-24.
GDP has been running well above potential for the past four quarters. In other words, it's unlikely in the extreme that the Fed has meaningfully slowed down the economy. So far, anyway.
POSTSCRIPT: This really ought to be causing some head-scratching among economists. How is it that the Fed can sharply raise policy rates and yet the economy is running red hot two years later? It's a mystery.
Last Wednesday night Kamala Harris offered some proposals to fight price gouging. They've gotten pretty bad reviews in the press, so I was curious to read what she actually said. Not paraphrases from reporters or speculation about what she "probably" meant from columnists. Just what she actually said.
That turned out to be surprisingly hard! Her campaign released a statement, but it's nowhere to be found. However, I finally tracked down a reporter who, I think, reprinted the whole thing. Here it is:
Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz will work to enact a plan in their first 100 days to go after bad actors to bring down Americans’ grocery costs and keep inflation in check. They will work with Congress to:
Advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries.
Set clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries.
Secure new authority for the FTC and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules.
Extreme consolidation in the food industry has led to higher prices that account for a large part of higher grocery bills. To confront this issue, Vice President Harris will also direct her administration to crack down on unfair mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to jack up food and grocery prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers.
And her plan will support smaller businesses, like grocery stores, meat processors, farmers, and ranchers, so those industries can become more competitive.
As many people have commented, there's not much detail here. Basically, she'll task the FTC with investigating companies that "break the rules," but there's no explanation of what rules she has in mind. Her only firm proposal is to "crack down" on unfair mergers, which just means getting aggressive on antitrust and price fixing, which is already illegal.
I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food. My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead.
We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy. More competition means lower prices for you and your families.
There's a little more here: the penalties are for companies that break the rules during crises. Our best guess about what this means comes from her own past:
In 2020, when Harris was a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored legislation that would have defined price gouging in an emergency as charging more than 10 percent above the previous average price. The bill built in a defense for sellers that could show price hikes flowed from their own rising costs. The proposal was modeled after California's anti-price gouging law, which Harris warned businesses against violating when she was the state's attorney general.
Most states already have laws very similar to this, so it's unclear how much difference a federal law would make. That said, the evidence suggests Harris wants two things:
A federal law similar to existing state laws that prohibits sudden, unjustified price hikes during emergencies (floods, hurricanes, pandemics, etc.).
More aggressive enforcement of price-fixing and antitrust regulations.
There's nothing about price controls here, and not even much suggestion of anti-gouging action outside of natural disasters (and even then, only if it's gratuitous gouging, not price hikes due to higher wholesale costs). This may or may not be a good idea, bit it's surprisingly modest given the ruckus it produced in the press.
In the Washington Post today, David Lynch writes about the economic problems of Erie, Pennsylvania, a "left behind" community that's been devastated by the decline of the Rust Belt.
And make no mistake: Erie is a very poor area, with low incomes and high poverty rates. And yet, there's something interesting about it:
At its height, incomes in Erie were about the same as the national average. Its decline began in the Reagan era and then it was decimated in the aughts by the exit of manufacturing to China.
But more recently there's a surprise that doesn't quite fit the narrative: Erie has rebounded pretty strongly during the past decade. Over the past twelve years, the median household income has gone up 26% even after adjusting for inflation. That compares to 16% for the rest of the country.
This still leaves Erie pretty far behind the US average. Nevertheless, that rebound is surely worth taking note of. Sometimes the world is more complicated than a simple, phoned-in narrative can account for.
Harris stands at 49 percent to Trump’s 45 percent among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup.... Given the margin of error in this poll, which tests only national support, Harris’s lead among registered voters is not considered statistically significant.
Technically this is right, but it's a damn close call. In a poll with 1,975 respondents a 4-point lead might not quite be significant at the conventional 95% level, but it is at the 92% level. That's a pretty high probability that Harris really is ahead.
UPDATE: The ABC News report on the poll says Harris leads 51-45 among likely voters. That's extremely statistically significant no matter what standard you use.
Oh great. It's no longer possible to download the Barnes & Noble Nook app, which means there's no way to install it on my new tablet. This in turn means that the ~100 books I have on Nook are now gone. Pffft. I will never be able to read them again.
Three cheers for the intersection of modern technology and crappy corporations.
Quick question: how's the performance of the blog these days? Normal? A little sluggish? Lightning fast? Infuriatingly slow?
Just curious. I'm just wondering how my hosting company is doing lately.
UPDATE: OK, thanks. The reason I asked, obviously, is that performance lately has been abysmal and I was hoping against hope that it was just me. But it's not.
I use Bluehost, and for the first couple of years it was fine. Then it started to deteriorate and a few months ago it just imploded. Occasionally it's fine, but usually it's molasses slow and it constantly loses connection to the server or throws up a 5xx error. A bit of googling suggests that everyone hates Bluehost these days because their performance has become so bad.
So I suppose I should switch hosting services, even though the thought fills me with dread. In theory it's easy: make a backup, restore to the new server, wait for the new DNS to propagate, and you're done. In reality, I know there's no chance of things going so smoothly. Plug-ins? Comments? Stored images? RSS feed? Etc. etc.
But I'll have to bite the bullet eventually. Anyone have recommendations for a reliable WordPress hosting service?
Trump: A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. A lot of people like to say it’s a tax on us. No… It’s is a tax that doesn’t affect our country. pic.twitter.com/NNyNthZbKg
This brings up the eternal question: Is he lying or is he really so stupid he believes this? I mean, who does he think collects tariffs?¹ From whom?² Does he think we send the bill to Xi Jinping, who then sends us a check?³
This is not one of those things where liberal and conservative economists disagree. It's just a boring bit of accounting. But I suspect Trump simply doesn't know this and no one has the courage to tell him. It's startling to say this is the least of his problems, but it's true: He's a moron. And it's the least of his problems.
¹Answer: Customs and Border Protection.
²Answer: Whoever is importing the goods. Eventually, consumers pay most or all of it in the form of higher prices.
Despite decades of DEI programs, the share of women in computer-related jobs has plummeted. The share getting bachelor's degrees in computer science has rebounded a bit over the past decade but is still well below its level in 1990.
