Ten paragraphs into yet another story about struggling boys these days, we get this:
Girls have been surpassing boys in school since at least the 1950s, says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization. Colleges in the past were more willing to accept male applicants in need of improvement. That has changed, and women now outnumber men on college campuses.
My guess is that "since at least the 1950s" means "basically forever." We have a remarkable ability to forget just how ill-behaved men have been since the start of time. It's only more obvious now because, like colleges, we're no longer willing to indulge it.
The Washington Post reports today about a brewing controversy over bank safety. The Fed wants to increase capital requirements for risky mortgage loans, with riskier loans requiring more capital. This sounds sensible, but banks, of course, are fighting it.
The only thing that makes this a live controversy is that the banks have an odd partner: organizations that advocate for more Black homeownership. Because of their lower income and smaller wealth (for down payments), Black homebuyers are generally riskier than white ones. Increasing capital requirements for their loans will probably lead to higher interest rates and push the Black homeownership rate even lower than it already is.
In one sense, this is yet another example of a truism: low incomes make everything harder. We would most likely be better off if we stopped piecemeal resistance to every regulation that might hurt the poor and simply gave them more money. This would accomplish the same thing but still allow sensible regulation and rulemaking.
In the case of Black homebuyers, the problem goes beyond income anyway. I did a very rough horseback calculation of how much homeownership you'd expect among Black families just based on their lower average incomes and then compared it to reality:
Take these numbers with a grain of salt. But only a grain: they're probably not too far off. What they show is that you'd expect the Black homeownership rate to be about ten points lower than white homeownership just by virtue of their lower incomes. But in reality, Black homeownership is about ten points lower still. This difference might be due to a lot of things, but plain old racism is almost certainly part of it.
So sure, we could give money to low-income families. That would help. But it wouldn't solve the whole problem.
Check out Casey DeSantis on Fox News asking supporters to swarm into Iowa and commit election fraud:
This is not a "gaffe." It was obviously planned and rehearsed. "You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus," she said. That isn't a case of sloppy wording in a live interview. It's an explicit call to break the law.
Today DeSantis is saying that "participate" just means, you know, participate. Not vote. How silly that anyone would think otherwise!
Apropos of nothing, I was browsing through a bunch of YouGov polls and thought I'd put together a summary of Republican views of the world. YouGov is handy for this because they ask lots of different questions and always provide crosstabs. Here it is:
You may think this is my way of saying "Republican are idiots." But not really.¹ My point is more that, thanks to Fox News and Donald Trump and the rest of the conservative ecosphere, this is what Republicans think of the world. They believe Christians are widely discriminated against. They believe Biden stole the election. They believe COVID came from a Chinese lab. They believe we're in a recession. Virtually all them believe the country is "out of control."
If you believed this stuff, you'd act like a Republican too. We are all far more susceptible to what the media tells us than we like to think. The problem with Republicans is just that their media is so much worse than ours.
If someone else wants to create a chart like this for Democrats, feel free to dive in.
You really have to watch this short clip of Jake Tapper's interview with Rep. James Comer today. It's about David Weiss's indictment of Hunter Biden on tax charges, and Tapper is literally laughing in Comer's face. But Comer is such an idiot that he's completely oblivious. Classic TV.
I see a meme going around suggesting that only Democratic presidents create jobs, but it's pretty misleading. As much as I prefer not to give Trump credit for anything, job creation was fine on his watch. It's not fair to charge him with the pandemic collapse, nor to give Biden credit for all the gains since then. You really need to acknowledge a pandemic "time-out," which ends Trump's record in March 2020 and starts Biden's two years later. Here's what that looks like:
This isn't "official," but it's a more reasonable look at what really happened to the economy after adjusting for the pandemic. Basically, everyone is about the same except for Clinton, the employment GOAT among recent presidents, and George W. Bush, the goat among recent presidents.
This is getting tiresome. The New York Times tells us today that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, has apologized for her congressional testimony earlier this week. Here's their summary:
Asked during Tuesday’s hearing whether urging the genocide of the Jewish people amounted to defying Harvard policies against bullying and harassment, Dr. Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.”
Yes, she said that. But she immediately added that it was harassment if it was "targeted at an individual":
Anti-semitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct and we do take action.
Politically speaking, Gay and the other presidents should have had the presence of mind to say that calling for genocide was vile and disgusting and had no place on their campuses. That's especially the case since they were dealing with a grandstanding jackass like Rep. Elise Stefanik. Then they could have added that although this is hard to accept, even vile anti-semitism is protected free speech unless etc. etc.
Apologizing for not doing that is the right thing to do. Nonetheless, it remains the case that Gay's answer was, in fact, the right one. Free speech is meaningless unless it applies to the most revolting and offensive speech too.
Charlie has been amping up the cuteness lately. Maybe he's having his second childhood a little early? In this picture he's up on the balcony keeping an eye on his domain as he rolls around for the camera.
Here's an odd thing. Several people suggested that Bard had a hard time with its fun facts about me because, after all, there are multiple Kevin Drums and it can't reliably know which one I was asking about.
In fact, LinkedIn lists 20 Kevin Drums! That seems like a lot. I was curious about one of them who is allegedly CEO of Infinity Technology in Arizona, but when I clicked on the company it brought up an outfit in Pune, Maharashtra. Further googling turns up nothing. Does LinkedIn also make stuff up?
According to Social Security death records, a grand total of one (1) person named Kevin Drum has died in the past 80 years (through 2014). So it's not a common name, and googling brings up almost no hits except for me and my namesake in Pinehurst who likes to golf and run for mayor.
Bottom line: I don't think Bard had any problem mixing up Kevin Drums. It just likes to make shit up. I also doubt that LinkedIn really has 20 Kevin Drums. I mean, maybe, but it just doesn't seem very likely.
A month ago the National Retail Federation projected a weak holiday hiring season. But hiring data wasn't in yet, so it was just a guess.
Last week we got JOLTS hiring data for October and today we got employment levels for November. So now we can finally take a look:
Sure enough, holiday hiring is down compared to pre-pandemic levels. JOLTS reports retail hiring down 50% compared to the average of the previous decade. The employment report says retail hiring is down about 30%.
In both cases, however, the real decline came at the start of the pandemic. Hiring for 2023 is pretty much unchanged since 2022.
POSTSCRIPT: Just in case this is confusing, the payroll data is for two months (October and November) while JOLTS data is for one month. That's why they differ significantly.
