Kevin Drum

Unlike the photos, I had no problem finding ten interesting charts. In fact, I found 20. So at the risk of taking a good thing too far, here are the top 20 most interesting charts of 2023.

By the way: by "interesting," I mostly mean "something you might find surprising."

1. The cost of college hasn't gone up much

The list price of a college education has skyrocketed, as everyone knows. But it turns out that universities discount heavily, which means that the actual cost of tuition has risen only slightly over the past 30 years.

2. Remote teaching didn't cause learning losses during COVID

Test scores for American kids dropped precipitously following the COVID pandemic. But it turns out that remote teaching had little or nothing to do with it: scores dropped almost identically in states that shut schools (right side of chart) vs. those that kept them open (left side). The same thing turns out to be true internationally.

3. Crime didn't go up during the pandemic

Now that more data is available, we can say pretty conclusively that both property crime and violent crime were either flat or down during the pandemic. However, murder spiked considerably. This is a big mystery since murder rates usually follow violent crime rates pretty closely. As far as I know, nobody has come up with a good theory to explain this.

4. Washington DC has a lead problem

Speaking of murder, Washington DC has had an unusually large murder spike and an increase in violent crime, and it started before COVID. Why? My guess is that it's because they had a big problem with lead in their drinking water in 2000-04. Twenty years later all these lead poisoned kids have pushed up the crime rate.

5. Drone strikes are over

Did you know that Joe Biden has effectively ended drone strikes in the Middle East, the ones that kept killing dozens of innocent civilians? He has.

6. Kids are pretty safe these days

Declines in teen mental health are everywhere in the news these days, but whatever the cause it's not their actual safety. Every indicator of teen safety, from poverty to sexual assault to bullying to drug use to suicide attempts has been flat or down over the past couple of decades. The current generation of kids is in the best objective shape of any generation ever. It remains a mystery why they feel so anxious and depressed.

7. It's all in your genes

This shouldn't really be big news to anyone, but as more and more studies are completed it becomes clearer that a very large share of most cognitive traits is in our genes. For overall intelligence it's about 70%. Sleep disorders are 65% genetic. Memory is 45% inherited.

8. Inflation is over

This chart, using the Fed's favored measure of inflation, is probably the clearest illustration of the fact that our inflationary spike of 2021-22 is well and truly over.

9. Americans don't think the economy sucks. Only Republicans do.

It's commonplace to stare into our navels these days and wonder why people are so sour on the economy even though the economy is pretty good. One reason is that inflation was high until very recently, and it takes a while for people to realize that it's over. But the main reason is simpler: Republicans, even though they're personally doing fine, refuse to admit that the economy under Joe Biden is good—which brings down the national average. This is due more to Fox News than to anything objectively wrong with the economy.

10. China is not having kids anymore

Outside of wartime, the plunge in Chinese fertility over the past five years is unprecedented.

11. Shoplifting is the same as ever

Media frenzies are hard to fight. If someone takes a cell phone video of a gang sweeping through a store and stealing stuff in broad daylight, and then that video gets played 24/7 along with a few others, it's really hard not to believe that organized shoplifting has become overwhelming. But it hasn't. It's a problem, bigger in some places than others, but it hasn't changed much over the past decade or two. In fact, it's probably down compared to before the pandemic.

12. Republicans are crooks

Maybe this is just a coincidence. You be the judge.

13. We really hate each other

This chart also made my 2022 list, but it's important! It shows how much we hate members of the opposite party, and it's skyrocketed since 1994. That happens to be when Newt Gingrich became Speaker, followed shortly by the start of Fox News. This is not likely to be a coincidence.

14. Maternal mortality has skyrocketed

Maternal mortality in the US has always been high, and it's especially high for Black mothers. But over the past couple of years it's exploded. It's now twice as high as it was in 2018. The racial difference remains a mystery despite a fair amount of recent study, and the skyrocketing incidence of the past few years is a double mystery.

15. Men are still going to college

It has become conventional wisdom that there's a crisis among young men. Exhibit A is the fact that women significantly outnumber them at universities these days. And that's true. But it's not because fewer men are going to college. They're still attending at the same rate as always. The only thing that's changed is that more women are going to college. Generally speaking, the whole "crisis among men" thing has been substantially overblown.

16. Government spending is not out of control

Congressional fighting over the budget is all about discretionary spending. This is the spending that has to be approved every year, unlike, say, Social Security, which just gets paid out automatically to everyone who qualifies. But for all the kvetching, discretionary spending over the past 20 years is down for both defense and domestic appropriation. Adjusted for inflation and population, non-defense spending is down 20% since 2005.

17. AIs are good doctors

In a simple study, doctors themselves compared diagnoses from an AI to those from physicians. Even doctors agreed that the AI diagnoses were both better and more empathetic.

18. Skyscrapers are empty, but commuting continues apace

There is abundant evidence that downtown office buildings have emptied out as more people are working from home. But commuting to downtown hasn't gone down. This is a mystery.

19. Abortion is up since Dobbs

It's early days and reliable numbers aren't really available yet, but it appears that the abortion rate in the US is up since the Dobbs decision was released. Basically, abortions went down in red states that banned it, but went up in blue states because that's where women escaped to in order to get abortions. And while we're busting abortion myths, it's not really true that people got more pro-abortion after Dobbs.

20. This was not a huge year for labor

Because of the big UAW strike, there's been a sense on the left that this was a big year for labor. But not really. If you look at total strike days, it's all about the actors. Without the actors strike, total workdays on strike was no higher than last year.

This was a bit of a weak year for photos, largely because I haven't gone out a lot since the CAR-T treatment in April. Not only did I not have a hard time paring my choices down to ten, I actually had to work a bit to find a full ten I really liked. In any case here are my favorites.

Harvard has been in the news a lot lately, and among other things critics say that wokeism has gotten so out of hand that it's all but impossible to be hired there unless you're a person of color. That got me curious, and luckily Harvard has a convenient page listing all the new full-time, tenure-track faculty hires this year. Here they are:

This is just the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is basically all of undergraduate Harvard except for the engineers. There's also the business school, the law school, the med school, etc., which I was too lazy to do. But they look about the same.

I know that pictures lack precision for those who want to really get into their racial profiling, but I think it's pretty obvious that it continues to be possible for white people to get hired at Harvard.

I'm not a big NBA fan, so I've followed the hype over French superstar-to-be Victor Wembanyama only distantly. But I think I'm really starting to like the guy.

“With your first experience in Vegas — what did you think?”

“On earth, it’s probably the closest thing to a dystopia.” - Victor Wembanyama ???? pic.twitter.com/PoJRveKG3w

— Evan Abrams (@EvanHAbrams) December 29, 2023

Marc Thiessen has a list today of the ten worst things Joe Biden did this year. Here's the first:

10. He made the child-care crisis worse. As my Post colleague Alyssa Rosenberg and I pointed out in September, child-care costs have been rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation. We proposed expanding the State Department’s au pair program, making this lower-cost option available to more families. Instead, the Biden administration put forward a plan that would double the cost of hiring an au pair by tying compensation to state and local laws on minimum wage, which will effectively put the program out of reach for many working families.

Where's an editor when you need one? Wasn't someone around to warn Thiessen that, um, not too many working class families can afford an au pair in the first place? Come on, man.

But there's more! As it happens, the cost of childcare isn't in crisis and hasn't been rising at twice the rate of inflation. It's been rising at less than the rate of inflation:

Thiessen's mistake was relying on a Wall Street Journal article from August that used year-over-year inflation and just happened to catch a brief dip from a year earlier. As usual, this was enough to get the Journal's alarms blaring, but within a couple of months the illusory rise was gone. As you can see, when you take a broader view there's nothing there. Childcare costs have risen about evenly with inflation over the past year and are below inflation since 2020.

Someone on Twitter recently re-upped a Fast Company piece from a few months ago about our old friend, right turn on red—known to all traffic cognoscenti as RTOR:

It's time to ban 'right-on-red'

Cognitive overload is inevitable if drivers are expected to simultaneously watch traffic to their left and keep an eye out for anyone biking or walking to their right. The policy harms even those pedestrians and cyclists who avoid being struck, forcing them to maneuver around cars that have edged into crosswalks.

The good news is that U.S. cities are starting to recognize these downsides, which are particularly troubling at a time when pedestrian and cyclist deaths have hit their highest levels in 40 years. Several local governments have recently adopted no-turn-on-red policies, and others are considering doing the same. This trend should be encouraged. Right-on-red is an ill-conceived traffic rule that needs to die.

It's weird. I support RTOR but I don't have a huge axe to grind here. I'm just annoyed that these pieces routinely refuse to engage with actual research.

In this case, author David Zipper introduces one study from 1981. It does conclude that the introduction of RTOR increases pedestrian and bicycle accidents, and it seems to be legit. But this research is 40 years old and was done when RTOR was brand new in most places. Why not something more recent? Probably because literally all of the more recent studies have concluded that RTOR has virtually no effect on accident rates.

Zipper does cite one very recent article, but it's not about accident rates at all. It's about the eye movement of drivers at a red light. Here's the takeaway:

The largest share of attention among RTOR drivers is—surprise!—on pedestrians. If you add up all the attention generally aimed rightward it comes to about 60%. The researchers are plainly reluctant to admit this but they do tuck in the following:

The finding that relevant pedestrians were most attended to by drivers seems unexpected.... The large amount of time spent looking at pedestrians for both signal statuses indicates that drivers may be checking pedestrian areas more than previously thought.

Regardless of whether RTOR increases pedestrian accident rates, virtually everyone agrees on the following:

• At most, the increase is either zero or tiny.
• Either way, right-turning pedestrian accidents are a minuscule portion of all pedestrian accidents. For example, in a 1994 update to their 1981 study, DOT researchers found that over a 3-year period they identified 356 RTOR pedestrian/bicyclist injuries (including four deaths) compared to 119,000 total injuries (including 688 deaths) at signalized intersections. That's 0.3% of the total.
• Of the already small number of RTOR injuries, the vast majority (90+%) are minor.

It's notable that DOT hasn't done an RTOR study since 1994. It's just not significant compared to other traffic problems.

It's obvious that bicyclists find RTOR annoying. I get that. Right-turning cars intrude on bike lanes and require more attention from bicyclists. But annoyance isn't enough. Like it or not, all the evidence suggests that the actual rate of RTOR incidents is tiny and most of them are trivial. Banning RTOR is a solution in search of a problem.

POSTSCRIPT: Zipper does link to one other thing, an analysis of a pilot project in Washington DC. It finds that at intersections where RTOR was banned there was a large decrease in "failure to yield" on red lights. That's good, although the numbers are frankly too large to be believable. But there was also a large decrease when the light was green. This suggests something hinky going on with the measurements. What's more, when RTOR was banned they found an increase in crosswalk encroachment. There was no data on injuries or accidents.

Zipper also says that "Toronto officials have estimated that historically [RTOR turns] have accounted for some 2% of pedestrian deaths and 4% of cyclist deaths in that city." But that's low! So low, in fact, that the Toronto report specifically says "conflicts between right turning vehicles during the red signal and pedestrians or cyclists is not a systemic issue across the entire network." (Italics mine.) In a 52-page report with dozens of suggestions for traffic improvements, RTOR is so insignificant that it gets a grand total of two paragraphs.

When we last saw Charlie he was wearing a stylish black cone to keep him from picking at a sore spot on his back leg. That proved unworkable: it didn't keep him from getting to his leg and he was able to get it off anyway. So it was back to the ordinary plastic cone we got from the vet.¹

A few days ago we released him, but alas, we jumped the gun. His sore spot still has a bit more healing to do, so it was back in the cone. But here's an odd thing: normally Charlie doesn't sleep on the bed at night. He's usually under the bed or by the doorway or on a nearby chest. But when he has the cone on he sleeps on the bed every night. This disturbs Hilbert, who is used to having the whole bed to himself, but they've mostly worked things out.

¹For $30!

Interesting data:

Wish we had seen more takes about this trend. pic.twitter.com/zvQVVi75q9

— Conor Sen (@conorsen) December 28, 2023

What surprises me about this is not that passport holding has risen so much but that it was so low as recently as 30 years ago: There were only 7 million passport holders in 1989. That doubled by 1991 and doubled again by 1995.

Roughly speaking, this means that about 3-4% of American adults owned a passport in 1989. Doesn't that seem startlingly low? I would have guessed double that for business travelers alone.

Here's another oddity: after quadrupling between 1989-95, over the next 27 years the number of passport holders went up more than 350% while the number of overseas travelers went up only 150%:

During the pandemic, international travel collapsed but passport holding just kept on increasing at the same rate as always. Odd. I suppose part of this might be attributed to the popularity of having a passport as ID rather than for travel. Is that a thing?

You'll notice a small upward bump in passport holding in 2007-09. This is probably in anticipation of new rules that took effect in 2009 requiring a passport for travel to Canada and Mexico. However, the effect is small and passport growth continued apace after that. It doesn't explain much.

Now we're talking: Maine and Colorado say Trump can't run for president while Michigan and California say he can. No matter how you come down on this question, it really does seem like it needs a definitive national answer. Supreme Court, here we come.

I accidentally found myself last night on the home page of the State Department's list of (non-natural) overseas deaths, which Congress has required it to compile since 2003. I learned a few things:

• Americans like to go to sunny places and then drown themselves.
• Man, do a lot of Americans die in Mexico.
• An awful lot of Americans travel overseas to commit suicide.

You want some stats? I've got 'em. First, here are overseas deaths by year:

Good news! I plotted deaths versus number of overseas trips and it looks like travel to foreign countries has gotten safer and safer. In 2010, about 18 travelers per million met an untimely demise. By 2022 that was down to 8 per million.

Here are the most popular ways to die:

Auto accidents for the win! If you put together all road accidents (auto, bus, motorcycle) it's the biggest category by a landslide.

Finally, here are the most dangerous places. This is not really very useful since obviously places with lots of visitors will also have lots of deaths. Also, the State Department does a lousy job of standardizing place names, so these numbers aren't 100% accurate.

That said, Tijuana takes the fatality honors. It's the most dangerous city in the most dangerous country for non-natural American deaths. Unsurprisingly, your basic European tourist destinations (London, Paris, Rome) are pretty safe. You might have a heart attack there, but you probably won't die of non-natural causes.

I should note that this list is semi-random. I chose all the places with very high death counts except that I got bored with Mexico after a while and gave up. Aside from that, I included popular places plus places that seemed to have an awful lot of deaths considering their (probably) small number of American visitors. Riyadh, anyone? Seoul? Phnom Penh? Chiang Mai?