Kevin Drum

As we all know, anecdotal data is better than so-called "evidence" from the deep-state food bureaucrats at the BLS or the USDA. Luckily, I just got back from my local Albertson's supermarket and was able to personally check on the price of bacon here in California. There were four brands. The cheapest was $6 and the most expensive was $8, with an overall average of $7.

Hah! The idiots at the USDA claimed bacon was selling for $6.37. I guess we showed them. This is what we mean by "doing your own research."

POSTSCRIPT: On a serious note, in case you care, the USDA was actually dead on. Their estimate is for the four-state southwestern area, which is the closest they come to just California. My guess is that bacon is cheaper outside of California, where they're still allowed to torture pigs, and that brought the average down.

Here on the grounds of Melk Abbey in Austria, Marian has just walked through the Circle of Power. What superpowers do you think she gained?

Last night I came across a global comparison of different countries based on two measures. The first was GDP per capita, which is pretty standard. The second was Actual Individual Consumption, which is a more direct measure of living standards.

For some reason, the thing I found interesting was the ratio of consumption to GDP. The US, for example, had the highest consumption figure at $53,000 per person. This was also a very high percentage of US GDP.

Ireland, by contrast, has a fairly modest consumption of $30,000 per person but has a huge GDP. Consumption is a tiny fraction of GDP.

Among rich countries, here's the range of values:

At the bottom of the list are two kinds of countries. First there are oil exporters like Norway and the UAR. They generate a lot of GDP that never makes its way to ordinary people.

Second, there are countries that use financial jiggery pokery to artificially juice their GDP figures. This includes countries like Ireland and Luxembourg.

So what does it mean that the US has the highest standard of living and funnels most of its GDP to consumption? On the downside, it presumably means the US funnels very little of its GDP to savings and investment. Is there an ideal middle point?

I'm not sure. But I thought I'd share anyway.

David Dayen writes in the American Prospect this month about "surveillance pricing," the art of charging different customers different prices for the same thing:

Surveillance pricing is done in the dark because companies know there would be some degree of anger if a product with one price suddenly had 330 million. Any kind of discrimination only works well in secret, before too many people understand the implications. “What people fundamentally want as a public-policy goal is predictable pricing,” Hepner said. “If people were aware that they were paying differently, they would be upset.”

I have my doubts about this. The most famous example of price discrimination is airline pricing, where every single person in a single row of seating may have paid a different price. The second most famous is university pricing, which is explicitly tailored depending on how much money they think they can squeeze from you. In both cases consumers are annoyed by this behavior. In neither case has it caused a revolt.

As David notes, the most common examples of true surveillance pricing, which depends on the collection of personal online data, isn't about charging different retail prices to different customers anyway. It's about offering personalized coupons. Or pushing up prices and then offering discounts to holders of loyalty cards. Or taking advantage of circumstances, like Uber's surge pricing when demand is high. The first two are very public and very popular. The third isn't. That's because the first two are framed as discounts while the third is framed as a surcharge.

So that's the hot ticket: Figure out a way to frame your surveillance pricing as discounts for some people rather than higher prices for others. That's a rich American tradition, and you can be as open about it as you like. Not only will no one complain, they'll shower you with hosannahs and viral TikTok videos. Welcome to the future.

More from the focus group:

This is a master class in getting things wrong:

• Inflation in California has been lower than the rest of the country.
• According to the USDA, the price of bacon in California under Joe Biden has gone up about 18%, from $5.38 to $6.37.
• Much of that is due to Proposition 12, which mandated larger cages for pigs. Nothing to do with Biden.
• If bacon had gone up from $5 to $15, that would be a 200% increase.

I guess Californians are bad at math.

Behold Ben, a 42-year-old white guy from Texas, explaining to a focus group why he's moving away from Trump:

As far as porn stars go for affairs, he could have set a better example for who to have an affair with.... There are so many wonderful porn stars out there.... But I want a president who’s going to be able to cover up a $130,000 bribe to Daniels. If he can’t pull that off, I’m not going to trust him with the nuclear football. This seems like such an easy thing for him to screw up. I’m kind of leaning toward Biden now.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: the traditional way of paying hush money is with a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. If Trump had stuck to that he never would have been caught.

But no. Like the Nazis meticulously accounting for every death at Auschwitz, Trump had to bribe Stormy Daniels in a way that required meticulous accounting on his company's books. Idiot. So now he's a convicted felon.

The New York Times reports that RFK Jr. is unlikely to qualify for the presidential debate later this month. However:

In at least one respect, Mr. Kennedy has reason for optimism. Recent polling has positioned Mr. Kennedy closer to qualifying for the debate stage than any third-party candidate in more than three decades. Mr. Kennedy must earn at least 15 percent support in four approved national polls by June 20 to qualify for the debate. He currently has three of those qualifying polls, one from CNN, one from Quinnipiac University and one from Marquette University Law School.

Seriously? Yes: These polls do indeed place RFK Jr. above 15%. CNN has him at 16% and the other two have him at 16% and 17%.

Is this nuts, or am I nuts?¹ RFK Jr. can't possibly be seriously supported by one out of six of Americans, can he? My favorite poll, YouGov, puts him at 4%. What accounts for such a huge difference?

The answer is surprising: According to a New York Times test, it depends on question order:

• If you ask first about Biden vs. Trump and then about all the other candidates, RFK Jr. does well.
• If you ask first about all the candidates together, RFK Jr. does poorly.

Strangely enough, this seems to be true. YouGov has a single question that asks about all the candidates and leaves it at that. The other three all ask about Biden vs. Trump first and only then ask about RFK Jr. and the others. This makes a difference of upwards of ten points in the results for RFK.

So what's the real number? No one knows. But the upshot is that people often support third-party contenders simply to show disgruntlement with the major party candidates. When Election Day rolls around, they've almost all settled down and end up voting for one of the main candidates. Historically, this has been almost universally true.

So the good news is that RFK Jr. probably doesn't really have much support, and the support he does have pulls votes away from Trump a little more than Biden. There's no need to panic.

¹These are not mutually exclusive, of course.

Sometimes astronomy night just doesn't work out.

I went out to the desert on Sunday with the intention of photographing the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex—which is basically a nebula but for some reason isn't called one. It's very colorful, and also huge, far too big to capture with my telescope. So I planned to use my regular camera instead. I mounted it on the end of the telescope tube and then got the telescope tracking, with the idea that the camera would follow along for the ride.

This didn't work. Partly that's because my favorite weather app betrayed me. It said the sky would be great, but in fact it was hazy and cloudy and I couldn't get a good, consistent view of Rho Ophiuchi. The other reason is that mounting the camera on the telescope tube turned out to be unstable and I mostly got only streaks. Also lots of noise, because the camera isn't cooled and it was 90° at midnight.

So it was a big bust, and I probably won't try it again because I just don't have the tools for it. That's too bad, since it's a beautiful bunch of gas.

I did take pictures with my telescope too, but most of them were no good—and even the good ones were so-so. I could only capture a small part of the cloud complex with the telescope, so I chose IC 4603, right at the heart of the whole thing. I wouldn't even put this up if I were going to do it again, but since this is probably my only effort I might as well let you see it. It's not a good picture per se, but it has a certain artistic flair to it.

From the Washington Post:

More than 300 House lawmakers were reimbursed at least $5.2 million for food and lodging while on official business in Washington last year under a new, taxpayer-funded program that does not require them to provide receipts.

....Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the program’s overall top spender, was reimbursed for nearly $30,000 in lodging expenses and more than $10,000 for food in 2023. He was reimbursed for more than $4,000 for lodging in two different months and more than $3,000 in five different months.

In the great scheme of things, $5.2 million isn't even pocket change. It's nickels-in-the-couch money. Still, combining this bill's reliance on the honor system with the fact that Matt Gaetz is the top spender is pretty good evidence that it's crooked. It's sort of like shoplifting, I suppose. Just a price of doing business.

I was poking around yesterday's update on construction spending and I noticed something odd. Total spending on construction has increased pretty steadily for the past decade. However, the number of construction workers took a big hit during the pandemic and never recovered to its previous trend:

This means that construction workers today are considerably more productive than they were a few years ago:

Has construction productivity really increased by $24,000 per worker? No special reason for this comes to mind.

Another possibility is that employment of construction workers has caught up to its pre-pandemic trend, but mostly by hiring illegal immigrants who don't show up on the books and aren't reported to BLS.

Or is there some other explanation?