Kevin Drum

Via Tyler Cowen, this is from the abstract of a recent paper that examines mortgage loans:

Interestingly, we also find that same-sex couples default significantly more (53.9%) than similar different-sex couples.

But that's not quite right. Here's what the paper itself says:

Male-male loan originations are associated with 2.053 percentage point higher delinquency rate relative to similar male-female applications. Given that the mean male-female delinquency rate is 3.81%, this result suggests that male-male  applications are 53.9% more likely to be 90-day delinquent relative to similar male-female applications.... The coefficient for female-female is statistically significant at 1% level and is about a third of the male-male coefficient.

Lesbian couples are only about 0.78 percentage points more likely to default than straight couples. This difference manifests in loan rejection rates, which are considerably higher for gay men than for gay women (and both are higher than rejection rates for straight couples).

Why? The authors say only that "we are in the process of understanding
the mechanisms that drive these results." If the data were available (I suspect it's not) I'd be curious about the delinquency rate for married couples vs. partners. This is just a guess, but I imagine that married couples are less likely to default regardless of sexual orientation.¹

¹My reasoning is that partners can, if circumstances permit, just say fuck it, split up, and hand over the keys. Married couples have to get divorced, which makes their home part of a legal process.

I missed this story a few days ago:

The FBI violated people’s constitutional rights when it opened and “inventoried” the contents of hundreds of safe-deposit boxes during a raid on a Beverly Hills vault in 2021, a federal appellate court ruled Tuesday.

....As part of its case against the vault, prosecutors had alleged that some of the vault’s customers were storing criminal proceeds in their boxes. Court records show the FBI also had developed a plan to permanently confiscate everything inside of the boxes worth at least $5,000 as part of a wholesale forfeiture, based on an assumption that those assets were somehow tied to unknown crimes.

However, in their initial warrant request, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office had not asked to seize the contents of the individual boxes in the vault and left out their plans to do so. They instead assured U.S. Magistrate Judge Steve Kim that agents would follow FBI policies for taking inventory of the box contents in order to protect against theft allegations, then contact the box owners about retrieving their property.

This case has been going on for a while, and it's a particularly egregious instance of civil asset forfeiture, the repellant legal theory that allows cops to take property they think is related to a crime—even if they have no proof and even if the victim is never convicted of anything.

In this case, the vault company itself was indeed shady, but there was never any evidence against the individual vault holders. It's certainly possible that some of them were guilty of something, but most weren't. And in any case, there's no excuse for taking people's money unless you can actually prove a case against them.

I continue to be gobsmacked by the whole concept of civil asset forfeiture. I've been assured by various knowledgeable people that it's a sound theory, but I don't buy it and I never have. If you have a case, get a warrant and then bring a case. If you win, seize away. But if you don't, what possible theory allows you to seize private property anyway? It turns innocent-until-proven-guilty on its head. It's insane.

POSTSCRIPT: I do have a question remaining about this. The court apparently ruled on the basis that the FBI had lied in its warrant application. But what if they hadn't? What if they'd told a judge what they planned to do and the judge went along? Would that have made everything kosher?

Labor productivity was up 3.2% in the final quarter of 2023. That's nice.

But for some reason I was curious about long-term averages over the past few decades. Here they are:

The last five years have seen the highest productivity growth of the past 50 years with the exception of the dotcom boom. But why? Here is quarterly productivity growth:

It's all because of a single quarter of stupendous growth. During the first few months of the pandemic, we produced less stuff but with a lot fewer workers—which produced a net increase in stuff per hour of work. Normally this would be a transitory artifact, made up in the next quarter or two by large declines as the labor market returned to normal. But that didn't happen. Productivity went up and then stayed at a permanently higher level.

Why? The productivity increase at the start of the pandemic is nothing special. The least productive workers were laid off or furloughed and the remainder probably worked a little harder. But why didn't that turn around as the unproductive folks were rehired? Maybe they never were?

It turns out that's the case. Since the start of 2020, the number of workers without a college degree has gone down 2%. The number with a college degree or higher has increased 7%. The distribution of the workforce changed during the pandemic and has stayed changed since then.

Disney has lost a round in its fight with Ron DeSantis:

In a legal victory for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a federal judge in Tallahassee dismissed on Wednesday a lawsuit filed by the Walt Disney Co. over the state’s dismantling of the entertainment giant’s special taxing district.

....Judge Allen Winsor of the U.S. District Court for Northern Florida ruled that Disney “lacks standing to sue the governor” and that the law it was suing over was constitutional.

And what do we know about Judge Winsor? He was, no surprise, nominated by Donald Trump. He is, naturally, a longtime member of the Federalist Society. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights doesn't think much of him:

Mr. Winsor is a young, conservative ideologue who has attempted to restrict voting rights, LGBT equality, reproductive freedom, environmental protection, criminal defendants’ rights, and gun safety. He does not possess the neutrality and fair-mindedness necessary to serve in a lifetime position as a federal judge.

In other words, Winsor is just your basic modern conservative judge, and that's about all you need to know. Of course he ruled in favor of DeSantis.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, Winsor agrees that Disney has suffered a general injury by no longer having a tax board it controls. His ruling denying standing to sue DeSantis is twofold. First, DeSantis's actions to stack the board with his lackeys is in the past. Nothing can be done about it now. Second, maybe DeSantis effectively controls the board, maybe he doesn't. But the board hasn't done anything bad yet, so who cares?

This strikes me as a bit of "heads I win tails you lose." Disney can't sue over past action, and future action is just speculative. But if that's the case, what would give Disney standing?

Winsor also inexplicably says that the law creating a new tax district is OK because it doesn't single out "a specific group." IANAL, but the record sure seems to show that, in fact, it does single out Disney and it was retaliatory. I'm not sure how much more explicit a law could be on those grounds.

Bum bum bum bum....

(Nah, it's just a dolphin.)

This morning, the illustrious Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing in which they got to chew out the heads of all the leading social media companies. I'm sure it was very cathartic. Here is Sen. Tom Cotton questioning the CEO of TikTok:

I recommend this entire Tweetstorm even though it's 166 posts long. I don't really know anything about Ari Cohn aside from the fact that he's a First Amendment lawyer, but he strikes me as having the properly cynical attitude toward today's spectacle.

If Cohn's summary is accurate, today's hearing was about three things:

• Generating soundbites for campaign ads.
• Accusing social media CEOs of actively promoting child porn and sex slavery.
• Insisting that social media has ruined America's children.

For what it's worth, I'll echo Cohn's remark that, in fact, research really doesn't support the notion that social media is harmful to teenagers. It seems to have both negative and positive effects, but they're small and the positive effects overwhelm the negative ones.

I admit this is hard to swallow. My own instincts yell at me that of course social media is harmful! And yet, if it's really so obvious it should show up easily in the literature, and it just doesn't.

Social media does produce habits in teenagers that are foreign to Baby Boomers like me, but that says more about me than it does about social media. It's also true that changes in teen depression seem to have started around the same time that social media became widespread. It's hard to accept that as a coincidence. And yet, the timing isn't actually quite right, and research hasn't been able to show any serious causal connection.

We should all keep an open mind about this. It's possible that it will eventually turn out that social media really is bad for teens. It wouldn't surprise me. But we have a long history of thinking that whatever teens are doing these days must be harmful to them. This is why different generations turn out differently. But generally not better or worse.

Pew Research has released its latest numbers on social media use, but as usual they leave out NextDoor, one of the most fascinating social media platforms out there. I have updated Pew's chart to include them:

The 33% number for NextDoor is based on their own claims, not survey data, so take it with a grain of salt. But it's probably in the right ballpark, putting them squarely in the company of Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn.¹

Anyone who's signed up for NextDoor and been bombarded by their email updates—which are deliberately hard to get rid of—knows that certain subjects are evergreen. Lost pets. Does anyone know a good handyman/gardener/plumber? There's a suspicious looking guy nearby.

It's the last one, of course, that's most striking. Without, admittedly, any real evidence, I partly blame NextDoor for the recent surge in people who are frightened of crime even though crime rates are historically low. It's hard not to think crime is rampant when you see these kinds of messages at least daily and often two or three times a day. And that's just my experience in Irvine, which is literally the safest community in the entire country.

It was bad enough when local news stations started dedicating their first ten minutes almost exclusively to crime. A man in Burbank was accosted and robbed tonight, police say. Really? That's the top news story? Yes it is, as long as there's video—and these days there is.

But now we also have NextDoor to scare us on a daily basis. No wonder we're all jumping out of our skins.

¹NextDoor almost certainly has a considerably lower engagement level than its more traditional competitors, but its basic usage rate is still pretty high.

Here's the latest from James Comer, lunatic chairman of the House Oversight Committee:

Biden family associate Eric Schwerin told Congress that he interacted with VP Joe Biden often and provided him free services. Once again, Joe Biden’s claim that there was an "absolute wall" between his official government duties and his family’s business dealings is a lie.

This was, of course, after a closed-door hearing, which means Comer can say anything he wants. And he does. But the New Republic got hold of Schwerin's opening statement:

Schwerin worked as a financial adviser for Joe Biden from 2009 until 2017, during which time he was able to see transactions in and out of the then vice president’s bank accounts.

“Based on that insight, I am not aware of any financial transactions or compensation that Vice President Biden received related to business conducted by any of his family members or their associates nor any involvement by him in their businesses,” Schwerin said in a prepared opening statement obtained by The New Republic.

....In his statement Tuesday, Schwerin said Biden had not been involved, either as a public official or a private citizen, in Hunter’s business dealings, nor had he ever been asked to take action on Hunter’s behalf. Schwerin said that in his role as Hunter’s business partner, he never asked Biden to get involved with their work. He and Hunter never suggested to or promised their clients or associates that Biden would get involved, either.

“In my discussions with the Vice President concerning his personal finances, he was always crystal clear that he wanted to take the most transparent and ethical approach consistent with both the spirit and the letter of the law,” Schwerin said. “Given my awareness of his finances and the explicit directions he gave to his financial advisers, the allegation that he would engage in any improper conduct to benefit himself or his family is preposterous to me.”

So, anyway, James Comer is a liar. Shocking, I know.

The Employment Cost Index represents the cost of employing an average person, and in some ways it's one of the most accurate measures of individual earnings. In Q4, after adjusting for inflation, it was up 0.9% from the previous quarter on an annualized basis:

The biggest winner last quarter was transportation. The smallest increase was for managers:

Here's a quick recap of what's going on lately with border security:

1. Republicans are opposing an immigration plan that tightens up the border considerably without much in return for Democrats.
2. The House is moving ahead with an impeachment vote against DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for literally no particular reason and with no chance of success.
3. Texas is defying the federal government and cordoning off pieces of the border completely from the Border Patrol.
4. Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is saying that he won't accept any border proposal "that ALLOWS even one illegal crossing."

The purpose of these things is:

1. Making Joe Biden look like he's helpless to do anything about the border.
2. Giving Republicans a big stage to rehearse their border gripes on national TV.
3. Hoping that Biden will overreact, producing lots of video of federal officers tearing down border barriers.
4. Making it clear that nothing will happen as long as Biden is president.

It's all just a show to them. They could hardly make it any clearer.