As 2023 comes to a close, holiday shoppers offered yet another sign that the U.S. economy will roar into the new year. On Tuesday, fresh retail sales data from Mastercard showed that consumers spent big on gifts, meals and apparel in November and December.... U.S. retail sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24 were up 3.1 percent compared with the same period a year before, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures sales in-store and online across various forms of payment.
Inflation from November to November was also 3.1%. That means real holiday spending this year was precisely the same as last year. Nothing roared and no one spent big.
For God's sake, when will our nation's innumerate reporters knock off this nonsense? This particular piece notes in the fifth paragraph....
(The overall report excludes car sales and is not controlled for inflation.)
....but there's nothing to stop news writers from doing it themselves. The numbers are hardly a secret.
Every year or two there's a plagiarism scandal that makes the front page. The latest one concerns some stuff written a long time ago by Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University.
I am, as usual, unimpressed. With only occasional exceptions, these things are always the same: the culprit has been caught taking a sentence here and there from another source with only light rephrasing. Sometimes it's not even a whole sentence. It's never more than a short paragraph.
Who cares? Sure, it's a little lazy, but that's about it. In Gay's case it amounts to maybe a dozen phrases or sentences out of hundreds of pages, most of them technical descriptions of survey results. There are no stolen ideas or wholesale ripoffs. And none of the supposed victims seems to care except for Carol Swain, who wrote an aggrieved op-ed mostly about the fact that she felt insufficiently kowtowed to. "When one follows in the footsteps of a more senior scholar, one is expected to acknowledge the latter’s contribution to the field," she says as a warmup, before complaining that Gay is just another mediocre affirmative action hire.
But Swain is a crazy person who hates the left these days, so what do you expect? The actual plagiarism of Swain's work is minuscule and meaningless, as it almost always is. As Jo Guldi explains, a big part of this is basically an abuse of technology:
New technology makes possible an expanded definition of plagiarism that does not match our concern with misappropriating ideas.... Computers can search out every five word overlaps. Does it matter?... The technology of text mining can be used to destroy the career of any scholar at any time. The offense can be so trivial as to be meaningless in the line of argumentation on which the scholar works. The tech can be leveled against a dissertation, like Gay’s, that was composed before plagiarized software was even available. No matter. If you take a moral stand and others dislike you or are jealous of you, they will use these arguments to destroy your career.
Now, this is just me. I know that academics have their own standards, and that's fine. Nonetheless, I don't think very many of these cases pass a common-sense test for stealing work, and I wish we could all knock it off.
POSTSCRIPT: For an example of a real case of plagiarism, check out The Book of Animal Secrets, by USC oncologist David Agus. "It’s very bad," says Elisabeth Bik, a scientific integrity consultant. "The examples I’m looking at look like literally copy-paste jobs." Among many other things, it turns out Agus copied verbatim big chunks of a blog post titled “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe.” Now that's plagiarism. If you're going to do it, you might as well do it right and then blame your researchers if you get caught.
Here's a typical paean to the school system in Finland written in 2018:
10 reasons why Finland's education system is the best in the world
No amount of pontificating will change what we already know. The American education system needs to be completely revamped — from the first grade to the Ph.D.
....Finland is the answer — a country rich in intellectual and educational reform has initiated over the years a number of novel and simple changes that have completely revolutionized their educational system. They outrank the United States and are gaining on Eastern Asian countries.
Sounds fabulous! Let's see how Finland is doing these days:
Finland used to be far ahead of the OECD average of rich countries. But it's been declining for nearly 20 years and is now only slightly ahead. Finland is very much middle-of-the-pack today, ranking behind Switzerland, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Britain, and, of course, Japan and South Korea. That's in math. They do better in reading, but are still behind Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and (surprise!) the United States.
In other words, there was no secret sauce in Finland. In fact, there are no secrets at all. The problem the United States has with its educational system is simple and extremely well known: we do a crappy job of teaching poor Black and Hispanic kids. Among countries of 10 million or more, US scores for white kids are the highest in the world in reading and fourth highest in math (behind Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea).
That's on the PISA test, anyway, which is decidedly not the final word on student performance. But it's widely cited, so it's worth knowing how the US does.
Last month, a New York judge ruled against the delivery companies as they tried to fight against a $19.96-per-hour minimum wage for delivery workers.... Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Workers Justice Project, the advocacy organization behind Los Deliveristas Unidos, a union for delivery workers, told me the workers were getting paid about $1,500 a week now, up from about $800.
A DoorDash delivery guy in New York City makes $75,000 a year? The median individual income in NYC for full-time workers is roughly $60,000, which puts delivery drivers about 25% above average. Can that really be true?
In any case, the gist of the story is that once you clear away the underbrush it turns out that delivery prices are really high, to which I can only say: Duh. I mean, restaurants can hide it in the price of food or they can charge for it outright, but one way or another you're going to pay someone for taking the time to drive out to your place and back. Plus a tip. That's going to double the price of something cheap, like pizza or pad thai.
And then you're probably going to complain about how life is so much more expensive than it was for boomers. But there's an easy answer: make your own meals. If boomers could do it, so can you.
How Were So Many Economists So Wrong About the Recession?
Maybe they were wrong. Maybe the fabled soft landing will happen. Maybe it will turn out that high interest rates don't always slow down the economy.
But I would still counsel patience. Economists have been wrong so far, but that doesn't mean they were wrong. It just means that our recovery from pandemic supply chain problems has been strong enough to overcome the headwinds of rate hikes. So far.
But those infamous long and variable lags tend to last anywhere from 1-2 years, sometimes a bit more. We won't be out of the woods until late in 2024. We shouldn't count our chickens quite yet.
Happy Boxing Day! I have no pictures of boxes, but to make up for it here's a picture of the box-like Segerstrom Hall, crown jewel of the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts. A nighttime picture is here.
Did you know that the average body temperature has been steadily dropping since the early 1800s? It has:
In 1800 the average body temperature was about 99°F. Today it's about 98°F. How about that?
And why has body temp declined? Basically, better health:
Change in the population-level of inflammation seems the most plausible explanation for the observed decrease in temperature over time. Economic development, improved standards of living and sanitation, decreased chronic infections from war injuries, improved dental hygiene, the waning of tuberculosis and malaria infections, and the dawn of the antibiotic age together are likely to have decreased chronic inflammation since the 19th century.
This was a minor incident. The kid was never lost, was always under supervision, and was quickly reunited with his family. It produced some understandable, short-lived panic in the boy's family, but why was it even a local news story, let alone a national one?
Last night we got to talking about how fearful people are these days—parents in particular. This has to be one of the reasons why. Millions of parents are probably now terrified to put their child on a plane even though this kind of mistake is literally less likely than being hit by lightning and never ends up with the children in any actual danger. Why do we do this to ourselves?
Atrios notes today that New York City spent $155 million on police overtime this year in the subway and got little in return except lots of arrests and citations of fare dodgers. But it's actually even worse than that. Transit crime so far this year is down 2.3%. Overall serious crime excluding auto theft, which isn't part of transit statistics for obvious reasons, was down 2.7%.
In other words, $155 million—up from $4 million last year—produced more serious crime than the city average. Nice work.
POSTSCRIPT: What's the deal with the obsessive use of overtime in police departments, anyway? I know the cops like it, but why are cities seemingly more willing to pay overtime than to just hire more cops?
