Kevin Drum

Joshua Benton of Nieman Labs points us today to a recent study about people who "do the research" on fake news. In a nutshell, the researchers found that when people searched Google to check out a news article, it more often than not made them more likely to believe misinformation.

But why? Here's the technical explanation:

Evidence from these results suggest that lower levels of digital literacy correlate with exposure to unreliable news in search results after conditioning on demographic characteristics. A standard deviation increase in ideological congruence also appears to increase the probability of being exposed to unreliable news by a Google search engine.

As the chart shows, a Google search increased confidence in true news being true and fake news being true. In other words: The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. What the study showed was that lots of people have no idea how to use search engines and frequently just type in the headline of a fake news article. This is more likely than not to lead them to sources that confirm the fake news.

One more thing: In case your immediate response is a snide comment about conservatives, the study finds that liberals are a little more likely to be misled by a Google search. So there's that.

This whole Lloyd Austin thing is damn weird. He went into the hospital on January 1 due to "complications" from surgery but didn't tell anyone until four days later. I had a vague thought that maybe it was because the surgery was for something he didn't want to make public, like a vasectomy or syphilis scarring. But no:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had surgery last month after a prostate cancer diagnosis, officials disclosed Tuesday, detailing for the first time what condition led to medical complications and a lengthy hospitalization that he kept secret from the White House, Congress and the American public for several days.

Why would you keep something like this secret? As it happens, this episode doesn't really touch a hot button for me,¹ but obviously it has for a lot of people. It's sure peculiar as hell.

¹As you might guess, this is true of a lot of things that people hyperventilate about. I think we'd all benefit by calming down just generally. It's one of the reasons I liked Barack Obama so much.

Why has illegal immigration skyrocketed over the past few years? Steven Camarota provides a common explanation:

Once it became clear that the administration was not going to detain people, send them home quickly, or require them to wait in Mexico, the number of people coming to the border skyrocketed.

Here are total border encounters over the past few years:

I understand that this topic has long since become so politicized that no one cares about a fair interpretation of the actual data. Immigration hawks will look at this chart and say that the surge at the border began the instant Joe Biden won the election, but does that really make any sense? Are migrants from Latin America so tuned into US politics that they started surging to the border based solely on some vague campaign promises?

It's possible, I guess. But nothing actually changed on Election Day and very little changed even after Biden took office. It wasn't until June 2021 that Biden tried to halt the Remain in Mexico program, his first significant border action.

It seems most likely to me that Biden's policies began having an effect after perhaps six months in office. But by that point illegal immigration had already reached more than 200,000 per month and has stayed at roughly that level for the past couple of years.

I don't have a big axe to grind over this. Maybe it really was campaign promises that caused the huge surge. It just doesn't seem very likely. What seems much more likely is that the immigration surge began under Donald Trump and border policies both before and after Biden's election have had little effect. The surge had other causes.

But what were those causes? I confess that's mysterious. My best guess is that it was mostly a thermostatic response to a desperate demand for more workers at a time when the illegal immigrant population had been declining for years. But that's just a guess.

This is the Cluny-Sorbonne metro station in Paris. Pretty cool, isn't it?

The non-oil trade deficit declined slightly last month:

We've recovered from the worst of the pandemic, but we're still running bigger trade deficits than we did during the teens. This was a big concern back in the day, but for some reason nobody seems to care about it anymore.

Apparently there's some kind of foofarah over Elon Musk highlighting a tweet that claims more illegal immigrants are coming into the country than there are native births. As near as I can tell, this isn't true using any statistics, including the raw number of border encounters. Here's my best take at a true number:

Net immigration includes all migrants released by the Border Patrol due to lack of detention space; all CHNV paroles (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela); all transfers of children to HHS; minus deportations. It does not include migrants who are either expelled or transferred into ICE custody.

The numbers in the chart are monthly averages for 2014-2022 and actual monthly figures for 2023.

There are, of course, some number of migrants who cross the border illegally and are never caught. They don't end up anywhere in the statistics, so we don't know how many there are. However, if you added them in it's possible that net illegal inflow could be greater than native births.

Credit card debt rose in November at an (annualized) rate of 17.7%. Holy cow! But here's what that looks like:

Credit card debt has been rising steadily ever since it recovered from the pandemic crash. It's now back to about where it was in 2019.

True, 17.7% is a lot. But the data is pretty volatile. Revolving credit was up 14% in May. It was also up 14% last November and last July. It was up 19% in June of 2021. So the latest number might be a sign of a dangerous rise in consumer debt or it might not. There's no way to know yet.

Last week I went whale watching off the coast of Dana Point. I didn't see any of the fabled killer whales that are supposedly puttering around right now, but we did see some gray whales. The good news is that this was an early sighting and it was a pod of three, so I was fortunate. The bad news is there was no frolicking or leaping about, so I didn't see much aside from a few humps in the water.

But you get to see it anyway! From the top: all three whales surfacing briefly; one of the whales spouting; a whale of a tail.

David Leonhardt writes today about the misguided campaign against using standardized tests like the SAT in college admissions. It's easy for lefties to hate on the SAT, but there was a time when lefties loved the SAT because it was a way of identifying smart kids who didn't necessarily grow up in great neighborhoods or go to great schools:

Administrators at Harvard, who pushed for the creation of the tests, saw them as a way to identify talented students from any background. The administrators believed that these students would go on to strengthen the country’s elite institutions, which were dominated by a narrow group of white Protestants, as Nicholas Lemann explained in “The Big Test,” his history of the SAT.

There may be some level of unfairness in SAT scores, since rich kids can afford tutoring and test prep and that sort of thing. But that turns out to be pretty modest. Other common metrics used for college admissions—high school GPA, recommendation letters, subject tests, strength of curriculum—are far more unfair. They strongly favor elite kids, which is the whole reason the SAT was widely adopted after World War II in the first place.

(It's worth pointing out that this was the era of the GI Bill and the expansion of college admittance broadly. Adoption of the SAT wasn't originally designed to identify more Black or Hispanic kids, it was designed to find poor and working class white kids who previously had neither the money nor the encouragement to get into college.)

And like it or not, tests like the SAT really do have a good track record of predicting success, especially at elite universities. This is from a recent paper that Leonhardt cites:

As the paper shows, SAT scores are also much more predictive of college grades than high school GPA. Ditto for success after college.

No university in America (as far as I know) relies solely on SAT scores for admittance. It's one piece of many. But it's a pretty good piece because it is predictive of success and it isn't very biased against poor kids or students of color. Tests don't always produce the results we'd like, but that's usually not because the tests themselves are bad. It's because they reflect a reality that's bad. That's where our focus should be, not on shooting the messenger.

Time offers the following numbers about the Israeli campaign to starve Gaza:

A December report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification predicted that by February, all 2 million people in Gaza would face crisis levels of acute food insecurity, with at least one in four households facing famine-like conditions.

....[Colonel Elad Goren] says Israel is supplying 28 million liters (7.4 million gallons) of water daily to Gaza, has let in 126,000 tons of aid since the war started and increased the number of trucks carrying food from around 70 a day before the war to 109 daily this week.

....But Juliette Touma, Director of Communications at the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), tells TIME that the number of trucks, including commercial goods, going into Gaza has dropped from around 500 every working day since the war began, and there is not enough aid. The U.N. said that in the last week of December, food assistance only reached 8% of targeted people in need.

Needless to say, I don't believe Goren since Israel has consistently lied about this from the very beginning of the war. It's very plain that Israel and Egypt are engaged in a campaign to keep all 2 million Gazans on the brink of starvation. It's a war crime no matter what the circumstances.

This is sadly typical of Israel over the past couple of decades. Even for someone like me, who roughly believes that most of the problems in the Middle East are the fault of Israel's enemies, their response over the years has been so abhorrent that it's hard to retain any sympathy for them. Hamas or no, there's no excuse for displacing nearly the entire population of Gaza, leveling the whole place, and denying decent amounts of food, water, and medical aid to reach civilians.

I don't fault Joe Biden for siding with Israel. As usual with these things, it was a brutal Palestinian attack that started the war. But at this point he needs to do at least the bare minimum to stop Israel's vile tactics. A ceasefire may be the most popular solution on the left, but it's hardly practical since Hamas has made it clear that it won't abide by one. However, stopping military aid unless Israel allows substantially more humanitarian aid to get into Gaza? That's the bare minimum. It's past time for Biden to insist on it.