Kevin Drum

The Wall Street Journal reports today that office vacancies are at their highest level since records began:

A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in 1986 and 1991 and the highest number since at least 1979, which is as far back as Moody’s data go.

Leases are a lagging indicator. They're usually signed on a long-term basis, so even when workers stop coming into the office the space remains under contract for years. Eventually, though, the leases expire and they don't get renewed. That's been happening ever since 2020 and there's no reason to think it won't continue. Evidence suggests that the number of office workers has declined by half since the start of the pandemic, and leased space has nowhere near caught up to that.

As you can see in the chart, unleased space peaked previously in 1986, four years after the end of the Reagan recession—and that recession didn't see nearly the drop in office workers that we've seen in recent years. Even if big companies start requiring more workers to come in, we still have a long way to go before leasing catches up—and in the meantime that's going to be a big drag on the economy.

The LA Times has a story today about the miracle of East Palo Alto:

In 1992, East Palo Alto was dubbed the “murder capital” of the U.S., with 42 murders in its 2.5 square miles — a per capita rate higher than that of any other city of any size. In 2023, according to East Palo Alto Police Department statistics released last week, the turnaround seemed complete: zero homicides.

Law enforcement leaders, residents and city officials point to a complicated mix of circumstances that turned a crime-ridden community into what the mayor now calls “one of the safest places to live in the peninsula.”

That's amazing! How did they do it?

Well, the median income in East Palo Alto is now $103,000, but naturally city officials insist that's not the reason. They always do. The reason must be some set of policies that they themselves have implemented.

But put that aside. I had to read past the jump to finally find out what's going on. Here is a chart of murders in East Palo Alto:

East Palo Alto had a high murder rate for a few years in the late '80s and that was about it. The very next year after their record 42 homicides they recorded.......4.

And the trendline since 1993 shows a slow decrease from about 8 murders a year to 4. That's no miracle. That's just East Palo Alto getting richer plus the effects of lead reduction that affected murder rates in every city in the country.

If the city fathers of East Palo Alto want to crow about having zero murders in 2023, that's fine. They deserve a round of applause. But there's no excuse for the Times getting suckered into covering it.

File this in the "dumb laws" folder:

Erica Ingber has something of a dark past when it comes to handwriting: The future elementary school principal got a C-minus in cursive in the fourth grade. But she’s ready to follow the curvy ups and downs of a new California law that requires the teaching of cursive writing, which has been cast aside as obsolete in the digital age.

But cursive is making a comeback amid concerns that learning to use a keyboard had superseded handwriting skills that are important for intellectual development — and also that a new generation of students could not write or read the flowing words of historical documents, old letters and family recipes.

I mean, I don't really care much whether school children learn to use cursive, but a state law? In order to make sure that kids will one day be able to read old family recipes? Come on.

Although I have to admit that I wonder how people sign their names if they never learn cursive. I suppose we'll find out pretty soon as the first cohort of kids who weren't taught cursive grows up.

Dan Drezner has a great piece in Reason this month called "The Post-Neoliberalism Moment." It's an unfortunate title that hides its real argument: globalization didn't hurt us during the pandemic and we abandon it at our peril.

We heard constantly during the pandemic that supply lines broke because they were so complex and global. But that's not really the case:

The more economists study the effects of the pandemic, the less evidence they find for the argument that globalization reduces resilience. Almost all of the shortages that occurred during the pandemic had little to do with globalized supply chains. Rather, they sprang from two causes—

To summarize, Dan says the two causes were (a) CEOs who screwed up by not forecasting demand shifts, and (b) CEOs who screwed up because they were obsessed with lean inventories that buckled under the slightest pressure.

I've often wondered if anyone ever seriously believed that things would have gone smoothly if only all our goods had been made in America. The notion is beyond ridiculous. COVID hit us too and kept our workers away from factories, so why would locally sourced products have been in any better shape than products sourced from China or Malaysia? They wouldn't have:

Economists Pinelopi K. Goldberg and Tristan Reed recently looked at whether the global economy suffered from shortages due to disruptions in the global supply chain. They found the exact opposite. That's because an economy with thoroughly nationalized supply chains increases its vulnerability to localized shocks. Even in instances like personal protective equipment (PPE), the evidence strongly suggests economies more reliant on imports were able to recover their stocks far more quickly than those that tried to produce more PPE indigenously.

Personally, I'd add something that Dan didn't touch on: the widespread myth that the global economy responded poorly to the pandemic in the first place. It was a pandemic! Under the circumstances, things went remarkably well. There were shortages here and there, but nothing very long-lasting or serious. And thanks to government intervention, most economies hummed along fairly nicely despite facing a deadly viral pandemic unprecedented in modern times.

There are lessons to be learned from COVID-19, just as there are lessons to be learned from the China shock of the aughts. But the lessons are fairly narrow. Our experience certainly doesn't suggest that we need a wholesale reordering of the global economy. Count your blessings, folks.

Over at National Review, Michael Strain notes that confidence in higher education has declined considerably over the past few years. But he says it's not just because of Republicans:

Universities are bleeding support among Americans who identify as Democrats and independents as well. In 2023, universities had the confidence of only 59 percent of Democrats and around one-third of independents. Universities lost the support of around one in ten Democrats and three in 20 independents from 2015-2023.

Large reductions in the shares of independents and Democrats who are confident in universities rules out partisanship as a comprehensive and sufficient explanation for the fact that universities are bleeding support from Americans at large.

In the main, the problem lies with universities themselves.

Let's look at the numbers. Strain links to a Gallup poll which tells us that the share of people with high confidence in higher education has dropped from 48% to 36% over the past five years. That's a decline of about a quarter.

Now take a look at this:

Confidence in everything has dropped since 2018. GSS asks only about "education," not "higher education," but confidence has dropped by about a quarter, exactly the same as in the Gallup poll. So this is probably a pretty good proxy.

Education is right in the middle of the pack. There's absolutely nothing special going on there. As for why confidence has dropped across the board, that's a mystery. Maybe COVID has something to do with it? Or perhaps it's the constant conservative drumbeat about how America is going down the tubes. No one knows for sure.

Here is the quarterly change in population of the United States:

Every year, like clockwork, population increases a lot in summer and then increases at a significantly lower rate in winter. Why? Here are births and deaths:

Every year, births peak in summer and hit a low point in winter. Deaths peak in winter and hit a low point in summer. Here's how it all nets out:

Every year, net population increases most in summer and least in winter. That pattern collapsed during the COVID epidemic as deaths skyrocketed during various surges, but has now returned to normal with ordinary peaks in 2022 and 2023. However, the peaks have been steadily declining since 2015 as we have fewer and fewer children.

POSTSCRIPT: On an unrelated note, the CDC makes it all but impossible to get monthly birth figures for more than the past couple of years. I have no idea why. If I didn't fall into dumb obsessions fairly easily I would have given up long before I finally managed to retrieve them.

wtf?

Congressional leaders reached a $1.66 trillion agreement Sunday to finance the federal government in 2024, preserving funding for key domestic and social safety net programs in the face of GOP demands to cut the government’s budget.

After months and months of demanding cuts beyond the numbers agreed to in the debt ceiling agreement, they've now agreed to the whole package: $1.59 trillion plus $69 billion in side deals, for a total of $1.66 trillion. Nondefense discretionary spending will be $773 billion, nearly the same as last year. There will be no 1% cut, no sequestration, and no reliance on a CBO estimate that doesn't count prefunded programs. Just an ordinary budget bill that's the same as the Senate bill that's been lying around for months.

Why couldn't we have done this half a year ago? And why did Republicans have to dump Kevin McCarthy?

All that's left now is to write actual appropriations bills. Should be a piece of cake.

From Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, after being told VP Mike Pence was in danger:

Who cares?

Longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino was in the Oval Office that day:

When Scavino and other White House officials learned that rioters had violently stormed the Capitol, they rushed into the dining room to urge Trump to help calm the situation.

....After unsuccessfully trying for up to 20 minutes to persuade Trump to release some sort of calming statement, Scavino and others walked out of the dining room, leaving Trump alone, sources said. That's when, according to sources, Trump posted a message on his Twitter account saying that Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done."

Scavino told prosecutors that Trump "was just not interested" in doing anything to halt the rising violence that day.

Back in 2006 business interests in Florida successfully amended the state constitution to require a 60% vote to pass future amendments. Ironically, the amendment wouldn't have won if it had already been in place, since it received less than 60% of the vote. Nevertheless, it passed and it's the law.

But now even that isn't good enough. An abortion rights amendment has qualified for the ballot, so anti-abortion activists are trying to pass an amendment that would require future amendments to get 67% of the vote. At the same time, attorney general Ashley Moody is trying to get the state supreme court to kill the proposed abortion-rights amendment on the grounds that it's misleading because it doesn't explicitly define words like viability, health and health care provider. If conservatives succeed in both these efforts, it will become all but impossible to make abortion legal in Florida even if a large majority of voters supports it.

Probably both efforts will fail and voters will be allowed to decide if they want to make abortion legal. But can they get 60%? Various statewide polls have put support for abortion rights at 56%, 62%, 57%, and 68%, so it's a close call. And even if the amendment passes, then supporters will have to fight the best efforts of the legislature to undermine it, and those efforts will be all but fanatical.

Abortion might become legal in Florida soon. But it's not going to come easily.

In a paper published last summer, a pair of researchers looked at how well ChatGPT improves writing. They rounded up several hundred knowledge workers with average salaries around $70,000 and paid them to write short, typical business memo type things. After the first writing task, half the group was told to sign up for ChatGPT and use that to help out. Here are the results:

With ChatGPT to help out, the time taken for the writing task decreased nearly 40%. When a human graded the writing, grades with ChatGPT increased about 20% on a scale of 1-7.

Roughly speaking, what happened was that bad writers became good writers and good writers became (slightly) better and (slightly) faster writers. Poor writers closed a big chunk of the original gap against good writers, though not all of it.

This doesn't mean that writers will be put out of work by ChatGPT. Not yet, anyway. But it does suggest that the pay premium for being a good writer is likely to go down. Why pay extra for a great writer when a mediocre writer can be made pretty good with a little bit of AI help?