Kevin Drum

Matt Yglesias takes on the "Deaths of Despair" meme today. It originates with Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who wrote about it a few years ago, and, as Matt points out, it's somehow survived despite a series of statistical examinations that have left it in tatters. If you adjust for age, it becomes less dramatic. If you adjust for geography, it's limited largely to the South. If you break it down by education, it's largely a phenomenon of high school dropouts. Matt continues:

The rise in deaths of despair turns out to overwhelmingly be a rise in opioid overdoses. This increase is not happening in European countries that have not only been buffeted by the same broad economic trends as the United States, but are also seeing the rise of right-populist backlash politics.

The obvious explanation is that the US and Europe have very different laws governing pharmaceutical marketing....This is all actually pretty clear cut and has been said before, but critics must not be saying it clearly (or rudely) enough because the narrative just keeps trundling forward.

I agree with Matt's larger point: the deaths of despair narrative doesn't really seem to hold water, and it's worth saying this bluntly. But is it really just about opioid overdoses? Let's revisit a recent chart from Case and Deaton:

US life expectancy has taken a big hit compared to other rich countries, but it turns out this is largely due to reduced growth rates among high school dropouts. The slowdown started around 1998 or so, which means it has to be related to something that changed in 1998 or earlier. Something that changed more for high school dropouts than for college grads.

Now let's take a look at drug overdoses from a recent RAND study:

There's a huge difference in the rise of opioid overdoses between college grads and high school dropouts. And the OxyContin revolution started in 1996, which makes it a natural candidate for a trend that began in 1998.

But the difference is fairly modest until around 2015, when fentanyl hits the scene. Between 2000 and 2015 the difference rose by about 30 per 100,000. Then, in just the few years from 2015 to 2021, it rose by about 45 per 100,000. Thus we'd expect life expectancy growth for high school dropouts to slow down between 2000 and 2015, and then to really slow down from 2015 to 2021.

And this is roughly what happened—until COVID hit and the bottom fell out of everything. So the only remaining question is this: Is the increase in overdose deaths among dropouts (bottom chart) enough to account for their stagnant life expectancy (top chart)? This is something that only an expert can answer. Any volunteers?

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow forecast continues to suggest that the economy was red hot in Q3:

Their forecast of 5.1% growth is largely based on increases in consumer spending (2.5%) and net exports (1%). Those subcomponents are indeed looking good so far:

The trade deficit is on track to be $20+ billion better than in Q2, while PCE jumped in July and has stayed on a higher track since then. That 5.1% growth forecast is still a little hard to believe, though, and the New York Fed agrees:

Both of these forecasts have reasonably good track records, so it's odd that they're in such sharp disagreement. The New York Fed doesn't put the Atlanta Fed's forecast even within the outer bounds of probability.

The BEA's first official estimate of third quarter GDP will be released in a couple of weeks, on October 26. We'll find out then who's right.

On Sunday night I decided to try again photographing our old friend the Wizard Nebula. This time I changed two things. First, I went up to Palomar Mountain instead of out to the desert. The sky there isn't as dark, but Palomar's 5,000-foot elevation provides clearer skies and cooler weather. Second, I used a 7 nm narrowband filter designed to let through only the light typically emitted by nebulae. This provides more definition and reduces light pollution, which can't get through the filter.

And one other thing: the combination of less darkness, the light pollution filter, and the star reduction function in my software produced a picture with fewer distractions from a heavy, bright star field. The end result was far, far better than my previous picture. It's probably about as good as I can get with my equipment.

Sunday's picture is below. Last month's picture is at the bottom for comparison.

A few days ago Benjamin Wallace-Wells interviewed Michael Mina, an immunologist and epidemiologist who argues that COVID-19 is a "textbook virus": the more times you're exposed the more protection you'll have. He's frustrated that we didn't acknowledge this from the start:

This is a very different story about immunity than we were told through most of 2020 and into 2021, though. Back then, I think the conventional wisdom was that a single exposure — through infection or vaccination — would be the end of the pandemic for you. If this is basic virology and immunology, how did we get that so wrong?

The short answer is that epidemiologists are not immunologists and immunologists are not virologists and virologists are not epidemiologists.

....The worst thing we can do during a pandemic is set inappropriately high expectations. These vaccines are incredible, they’ve had an enormously positive impact on mortality, but they were never going to end the pandemic. And now, there’s a huge number of people questioning, do these vaccines even do anything?

Is this really right? My recollection is that quite early on the epidemiological community was fairly united in suggesting that COVID was probably going to become endemic, like flu, and would require routine annual vaccinations. That's certainly been my working assumption for the past couple of years.

Now, it's true that this message doesn't seem to have gotten across. The shockingly low rate of people getting boosters is evidence of that. And around the world, governments have become unwilling to push boosters for the entire population. That's unfortunate, but hardly the fault of the epidemiological community.

Of course, even takeup of the annual flu shot is only about 50%, and that's been around forever, complete with endless marketing campaigns. If half the country won't even get a flu shot every year, COVID never stood a chance.

In any case, the moral of this story is: get vaccinated! Again. Then, next year, do it again. And then again. Just do it.

We've all seen the videos of organized gangs barreling into stores, grabbing armfuls of merchandise, and then escaping before stunned store workers can do anything. The National Retail Federation puts some numbers to this crime wave:

Savvy, confident organized retail crime gangs — who steal billions of dollars worth of merchandise each year only to sell that merchandise online or at physical fence locations — continue to test retailers to the core, oftentimes stopping at nothing to profit from their criminal behavior. NRF’s ninth annual Organized Retail Crime (ORC) Survey found that 93.5 percent of retailers say they have been a victim of organized retail crime in the past year.

....One of the most distressing trends in organized crime activity is the propensity for thieves to resort to violence to avoid being apprehended, putting store personnel, law enforcement and customers at risk.

Oh wait. This is from 2013. It turns out that fear of criminal shoplifting gangs makes headlines every single year when the NRF's retail security report is published. It's nothing new. Here are the overall numbers for merchandise losses, or "shrink":

As CNBC noted last month in their report of the latest numbers—which apparently no one read—"the effect of theft on retailers’ bottom lines is about the same as it has been for years." Total shrink in 2022 was unchanged compared to before the pandemic, and of this total about one-third was due to shoplifting. (The rest came from employee theft, accidents, and other causes.)

So take all those reports of spiraling losses from shoplifting with a grain of salt. Total shoplifting losses increased from 0.49% of sales in 2010 to 0.56% of sales in 2022. That's up, but it's hardly an apocalypse.

Because it's the season for stories about teachers, here's the latest BLS report of public school employment for September:¹

Employment in 2023 is the highest it's been in the past 15 years, and the ratio of students per ed worker is down to 6.16, the lowest over that period. This is a pretty good year for public school staffing.

¹As usual, this is all local government education employees, not just teachers. However, teacher employment tracks total ed employment very closely.

This is a lone sailboat in the late afternoon, taken from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. There's nothing very special about this picture, but I'm accustomed to taking pictures of the Pacific Ocean, where I'm generally shooting into the sun. On the Atlantic coast you're shooting away from the sun, which certainly produces much deeper blues in the ocean water.

Will Bunch on the stakes of the auto strike:

"What Fain and the UAW are proposing isn’t just a nice little bump in next week’s paycheck, but a return to the day when a person from the assembly line could afford a fishing cottage — or to send their kid to college," writes @Will_Bunch.https://t.co/0KsHimntd1

— The Philadelphia Inquirer (@PhillyInquirer) October 8, 2023

For what it's worth, here's the approximate¹ pay scale for UAW workers over the past 80 years:

Workers have lost a considerable amount over the past two decades. However, if you're comparing current wages to the good old days of, say, the mid-60s, they're paid far more. They can afford more today than they could back in the heyday of Walter Reuther and the era of good feelings.

¹It's approximate because the pay scale depends on years of service. Some sources provide an average pay rate while others report the top wage rate. Currently, the main pay tier is reserved for workers hired before 2007, all of whom qualify for top pay, so the average is about the same as the max. For the years in between I've adjusted top pay rates slightly to get closer to the average.

Over at National Review, Andrew Stuttaford writes about the war against cars:

Some of those directing climate policy genuinely believe that climate change poses an existential threat to our species, but many others see it as a way to force the construction of the kind of society that certain strains of the Left have long wanted to see. Their policy prescriptions are about control, not the climate. And the car, with its promise of freedom and autonomy, is, both symbolically and in reality, the opposite of that.

Huh. I'm pained to report that, like the War on Christmas, the war on cars is going badly. As usual, in 2021 we suffered yet another setback:

You'd almost think there's no real war at all. Or, if there is, the folks running it are so incompetent there's nothing to worry about.

But what I really wonder is whether Stuttaford even believes what he says. There are certainly a handful of people who use environmental concerns as a cover for larger societal ambitions, but does Stuttaford seriously think that even these folks object to cars because they let people go wherever and whenever they want? Where does this strain of conservative paranoia come from? I've never come across even a hint of anything like this. Am I not reading the right eco-fascist publications?

Our latest Israeli-Palestinian war has me more depressed than I would have expected.

Longtime readers with good memories will recall that I long ago lost all sympathy for Israel. I won't bother spelling out the entire list of their appalling behavior, but it's long and damning.

But if it's possible to have negative sympathy for someone, that's what I have for the Palestinians and their Arab enablers. It's more than that, though; it's the unending inanity of their behavior. Israel's enemies have launched war after war over the past 50 years and they've been crushed Every. Single. Time. The result has been uniformly disastrous: settlements, walls, blockades, checkpoints, and massive oppression of Israeli Arabs. You don't have to approve of any of this to recognize that it's the easily foreseeable response of a nation under siege.

The same thing will happen this time. Thousands of Palestinians will die and Israeli retaliation will make the rest worse off than before. But I doubt that matters to the lunatics who run Hamas.

Is this simplistic? Sure. But sometimes it's best to just clear the fog. The only remotely reasonable course for the Palestinians—though it may be too late even for this—is to stop fighting and surrender on Israeli terms. There is literally no other option open to them aside from endless war and brutal poverty.