Cats, charts, and politics
Here in Southern California we got only a partial total eclipse, but the good news is that we actually got to see it. The skies were clear as a bell. So behold our mighty sun being eaten by our mere moon. But it would soon have its revenge.
A team of researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago has performed yet another version of a familiar experiment where they send identical resumes to different companies with only one difference: some resumes have distinctively white names (Misty, Brandon) and some have distinctively Black names (Latisha, Tyrone). Then they tally up the number of each type of resume that got a response.
Their test was massive, comprising 84,000 resumes for 11,000 jobs at 108 firms. This provided them with enough data to rank individual companies, and today, for the first time, they're naming names. Here's the report card:
The worst companies on this list contacted white applicants 23% more often than Black applicants. Six of the top ten were auto parts and related companies. Retailers also did poorly in general. On the brighter side, Charter Communications did very well, as did Kroger and Dr. Pepper.
NOTE: The companies listed in black are federal contractors. The companies in gray aren't.
Max Boot says Joe Biden deserves credit for his tough but restrained response to the killing of three US soldiers at a base in Jordan a couple of months ago by an Iranian-backed militia:
On Feb. 2, U.S. forces dropped more than 125 precision munitions on 85 targets in Iraq and Syria belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and its affiliated militia groups.... Five days later, on Feb. 7, a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad killed a senior commander of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most dangerous Iranian-backed terrorist groups.
....The clear message was that other Iranian commanders would be next if they didn’t knock off their attacks against U.S. troops. And guess what? Iran did stop. Things could change at any moment, but a senior U.S. defense official told me last week that there hasn’t been an Iranian-directed attack against a U.S. military base in either Syria or Iraq since Feb. 4.
This is typical Biden. It's not flashy, and he didn't brag endlessly about it on Twitter. But it got the job done.
He keeps getting the job done. Not the way everyone would prefer, but that's never in the cards. Somehow, though, he continues getting almost no credit for it.
Ha ha ha. Donald Trump has betrayed his pro-life supporters even harder than anyone figured. Today he declined to support any national abortion ban at all. Not 6 weeks, not 16 weeks, not anything. Just leave it up to the states. "Whatever they decide must be the law of the land," he said in a video this morning, "in this case the law of the state."
This was posted on Truth Social with no text to suggest what he was talking about:
What a coward! But by God, he says you should vote for him anyway because our country is on the brink and only he can bring it back.
Just in the past few days, Donald Trump has said the following:
Remember back during the Trump presidency, when every day was like this? You can't wait for life to be like that again, can you?
The Washington Post reports today on Donald Trump's "secret" plan to end the Ukraine war:
Trump’s proposal consists of pushing Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia.... That approach, which has not been previously reported, would dramatically reverse President Biden’s policy, which has emphasized curtailing Russian aggression and providing military aid to Ukraine.
So the plan is: Give Russia everything it wants. Helluva plan there.
And this guy is the leader of the Republican Party? The party that routinely accuses Democrats of being weak on foreign policy? The party that endlessly claimed Barack Obama was abandoning our friends and kowtowing to our enemies? That Republican Party?
Yep. That's the one.
According to COGAT, the Israeli agency that coordinates humanitarian aid for Gaza, 322 aid trucks entered Gaza today:¹
This is a direct result of Joe Biden's pressure following the destruction of the World Central Kitchen convoy last week. More routes into Gaza have been opened up, and aid is now getting to northern Gaza.
If this can be done for one day, it can be done every day. There is no excuse for famine in Gaza.
¹The COGAT numbers are usually about a quarter higher than the numbers provided by the UN. I don't know why. But whatever the precise number is, it's apparently a record.
How much are illegal immigrants paid on average compared to native-born Americans? As you can imagine, this is not an easy question to answer. It's not as if the BLS has a handy hourly wage time series for undocumented workers. They're undocumented!
The best answer I could find comes from a paper written in 2018. After you cut through the math and convert from log points, they conclude that when you compare workers with similar education, illegal immigrants make about 22% less than native workers. This is largely due to lack of bargaining power; English fluency; and limited job opportunities (i.e., the need to stay away from occupations that carry a risk of being discovered).
Note, however, that this an average for all illegal immigrants, most of whom have been in the country for many years. It's very likely that recent immigrants make less, which suggests that the typical recent border crosser probably makes about 30% less than a similarly educated native born.
What does this mean for the theory that illegal immigrants are stealing jobs away from native-born workers? On the one hand, they're taking very poorly paid jobs that probably don't attract natives in the first place. On the other hand, 30% is a big incentive for employers to choose an illegal immigrant over a native. It's hard to draw a conclusion from this.
So that leaves us to rely on other measures, most of which point to little effect from illegal immigration. The participation rate of the native-born population remains above its pre-pandemic trend:
The unemployment rate of native-borns is 4.0% and the wages of the poorest tenth have continued to rise in real terms. Taken together, all of this suggests that the recent surge of illegal immigration has had very little impact on the jobs of native borns. Probably none at all.
As we all know, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. However, he could produce only tiny amounts. It wasn't until World War II that we figured out how to mass produce it:
After a worldwide search in 1943, a mouldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois market was found to contain the best strain of mould for production using the corn steep liquor process.
Peoria! It's famous for something besides "Will it play on Peoria?" Also, Betty Friedan and Richard Pryor were born in Peoria.
Penicillin is not usually on lists of discoveries made during WWII, but it probably should be.
Last week Jonathan Martin wrote a column criticizing Joe Biden for not trying harder to get support from never-Trump Republicans:
I reached out to every current Republican lawmaker who has refused to commit to Trump in the general election. Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) Mitt Romney (Utah), Todd Young (Indiana), Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) all said the same: they’ve not heard from Biden. “It is surprising,” Collins told me. “It’s especially surprising because President Biden does understand the Senate, he has personal relationships with some of us.”
Martin was both widely praised and widely mocked for this. But today brings news that Biden is starting to run a new campaign ad:
The 30-second ad, entitled Save America. Join Us, targets Haley voters in predominantly suburban battleground state postal districts where she performed well against Trump in Republican primary contests.... It [] signals how Biden, a longtime champion of bipartisanship, is seeking to reach across the aisle one last time, courting moderate Republicans who cannot stomach their own party’s nominee.
The Biden campaign sees an opening in continued Republican opposition to Trump even after he clinched the party nomination last month. Haley dropped out of the primary race after Super Tuesday on 5 March but pointedly did not endorse the former president.
This is not the same thing that Martin was talking about, but it's in the same ballpark. And it may be that Biden feels like he needs to till the soil a bit before asking prominent Republicans for their support. They're most likely to say no, after all, and once you've gotten a no it's hard to turn that around. Sometimes it's better to wait.
"Republicans for Biden" is an obvious strategy for the Biden campaign. And maybe he should be setting it up now rather than later. But he'll get there.