Kevin Drum

No comments. By publication date.

1. The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844, by Alexandre Dumas
2. Crime and Punishment, 1866, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Southern California: An Island on the Land, 1946, by Carey McWilliams
4. Youngblood Hawke, 1962, by Herman Wouk
5. The Chronicles of Amber (first series), 1970, by Roger Zelazny
6. Time Enough for Love, 1973, by Robert Heinlein
7. The Power Broker, 1974, by Robert Caro
8. Plagues and Peoples, 1976, by William McNeill
9. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (first trilogy), 1977, by Stephen Donaldson
   
10. A Distant Mirror, 1978, by Barbara Tuchman
11. Godel, Escher, Bach, 1979, by Douglas Hofstadter
12. The Belgariad, 1982, by David Eddings
13. The Quincunx, 1989, by Charles Palliser
14. Infinite Jest, 1996, by David Foster Wallace
15. The Corner, 1997, by David Simon and Edward Burns
16. American Aurora, 1997, by Richard Rosenfeld
17. Cryptonomicon, 1999, by Neal Stephenson
18. Before the Storm, 2001, by Rick Perlstein
19. How Wars End, 2010, by Gideon Rose
20. The Broken Earth trilogy, 2015, by N.K. Jemisin
21. Chip War, 2022, by Chris Miller

Most of these charts are intriguing, not literally the most important trends of the year. But some of them are! Enjoy.

1. Abortions are up

The data now broadly agrees: ever since Dobbs the overall abortion rate has gone up, not down. Telehealth across state lines and pharmaceutical abortions have driven the increase.

2. Extremist killings are a right-wing phenomenon

Virtually all killings done by political extremists are right wing. This explains why that's what the media reports.

3. It was a bad year for incumbents

This was the first year ever in which every single election worldwide went against the governing party. Perhaps Kamala Harris did pretty well under the circumstances?

4. Partisan differences drive institutional mistrust

Generally speaking, it's not true that "Americans" have lost trust in institutions. It's mostly just Republicans, driven by the constant barrage of outrage from Fox News.

5. US government efficiency is pretty good

According to a World Bank measure of government efficiency, the US is one of the best big countries in the world. See also here.

6. Gender dysphoria is (sometimes) fleeting

Lots of young teens say they have feeling of being the wrong sex, but by age 19 it mostly goes away on its own. Only about 3% of people in their twenties continue to feel gender dysphoria if it's not treated.

7. Inflation happened everywhere

Inflation wasn't due to Joe Biden's stimulus bill. It happened everywhere in the world in exactly the same way and at exactly the same time. It was caused by pandemic supply chain shortages and government aid to keep people whole, almost all of which in the US was spent under the Trump administration.

8. Red states are not low-tax states

They generally tax rich people at low rates, but the working class doesn't do so well.

9. Illegal immigration is all about the jobs

Illegal immigrants come to America to work. The ups and downs of the illegal immigration rate can be explained almost entirely by job demand in the US.

10. Maternal mortality isn't up.

Last year, along with everyone else, I reported that maternal mortality was skyrocketing. But it turns out this is entirely a statistical artifact due to changes in the way maternal mortality is reported. When you correct for this, it turns out there's been no change at all since 2000.

11. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a model of great performance under terrible circumstances

Contrary to its usual description as "chaotic," the Afghanistan withdrawal mostly went well. The first day was indeed chaotic, which set the tone for all subsequent reporting, and ISIS killed a lot of people with a single suicide bomber. But for the most part the Army managed to airlift a stunning number of people to safety in only a couple of weeks.

12. Kids have given up on drugs

Teens continue to use marijuana a lot, but their use of cigarettes, alcohol, and hard drugs has plummeted over the past two decades.

13. Yes, we're building electric charging stations

The plan to build 100,000 charging stations across the US was always meant to take until 2030. The numbers start out small because you have to plan before you can build, but they're basically on track.

14. We need more doctors

Do you wonder why it's so hard to get an appointment with your primary care physician? This is why.

15. We sure are building a lot of offices

Despite the fact that we're supposedly not working much at the office anymore, we're building office space at the same rate as the peak of the housing bubble. This is all part of the mystery of just how prevalent teleworking really is.

16. Business formation is way up

In 2021 the rate of small business formation surged and has stayed high ever since. No one has ever explained this.

17. Overdose deaths are finally dropping

Starting last September, drug overdose deaths suddenly began to fall steeply. On a monthly basis they're now down a stunning 40% from their peak.

18. SNAP benefits have gone way up

I'm putting this one up because so few people seem to realize that Joe Biden permanently and substantially raised food stamp benefits for poor people. Since he took office, he's raised SNAP benefits by 43% compared to food inflation of only 20%.

19. Teen suicide attempts aren't rising

Over the past three decades, the number of teens who attempted suicide has been completely flat. This is one of several markers suggesting that we've overreacted to the notion that today's teens are existentially unhappy and stressed thanks to social media.

20. The Hispanic vote decided the 2024 election

Under normal circumstances, a 2% Republican presidential victory would predict a 33% winning margin for Democrats among Hispanics. In 2024 it produced a 5% margin. This is far and away the most crucial element of Kamala Harris's loss. The big question now is whether this is a permanent shift or a weird one-off, as in 2004.

21. Americans make a lot of money

According to the CBO, even the poorest Americans earn about $56,000 per year once you take into account taxes and government benefits. That's a pretty fair amount

This is the cathedral of St. Stephan in the German half of Passau.

Here are my top ten wishes for 2025. I guess you could call it a bucket list. I expect none of them to come true.

1. Waymo sells me a driverless car. Price is no object.
2. Medical boffins invent a cure for multiple myeloma.
3. AI writes my blog for me.
4. Cheap fusion demonstrated at scale.
5. Vladimir Putin suffers a fatal heart attack.
6. Elon invents a brain implant that makes me fluent in any language.
7. Worldwide carbon emissions decrease, even by a gram.
8. The US military stops producing manned fighter jets.
9. Good pizza place opens nearby.
10. Donald Trump gets laryngitis and frozen finger syndrome.
11. A really big, bright comet appears in the (northern hemisphere) sky.

I continue to be a little dumbfounded by the reversal of Joe Biden's fortunes among liberals. Less than a year ago he was being hailed as the best president since FDR, a guy who had unexpectedly exceeded every expectation for his progressive accomplishments. Today he's derided as an almost epic failure.

The proximate cause for this is Biden's meltdown in the June debate, followed by a long string of mea culpas from journalists who say they should have recognized his mental decline earlier—and who blame Biden and his staff for covering it up.

Fair enough—though I think the hand-wringing has been a little overwrought. Still, his accomplishments remain the same, don't they? Maybe not:

This critique of Biden's infrastructure record has become something of a hurricane lately—even among the "Build something, dammit" crowd. But what did they expect? Even in a perfect world without red tape it takes time to build big things from scratch. At a minimum:

1. States have to apply for initial funding.
2. The feds have to approve state plans.
3. Sites have to be located and purchased.
4. Competitive bids have to be solicited and then accepted.
5. If there are any lawsuits filed—and there will be—they have to be adjudicated.
6. Contractors have to draw up plans.
7. Then—finally!—they perform the actual construction.
8. All the money isn't allocated at one time, so circle back to step 1 for further funding.

This takes years. It always has. Remember all the talk about "shovel-ready projects" during the Obama stimulus era? This was an acknowledgment that building projects generally aren't great stimulus because you can't skip straight to step 7 unless you've already done the previous steps and kept a bunch of construction projects all set to go, just waiting to be unleashed during a recession.

But even theoretically this isn't possible for brand new projects like charging stations, semiconductor fabs, rural broadband, or rooftop solar. You have to start at step 1, which is one reason why they're almost always scheduled to be rolled out over ten years. (The other reason is that there's only so much construction capacity available. You can't do everything at once.)

Of course, in real life there's also red tape. What's more, some of it is legit by anyone's standards. For example, the Politico piece that Ezra quotes above says the rural broadband project has hit snags in Virginia:

The issue holding Virginia back appeared to be the law’s affordability requirement. According to funding rules published in May 2022 by the Commerce Department, any provider taking the federal money needs to offer a low-cost service option. The administration and Virginia were locked in a multi-month standoff over exactly how to fulfill that requirement — an impasse that hit many other states as well.

This is a perfectly reasonable requirement. But it's also perfectly reasonable that there's disagreement over how precisely to implement it. That's just the nature of the world.

There's nothing new about this. The interstate highway program took 36 years to complete. The California state water project took upwards of 40 years. The Erie Canal took eight years. The Tevatron particle accelerator took 14 years. So did Mount Rushmore. Boston's Big Dig took 25 years. The Evergreen Point Floating Bridge took 19 years. The Tennessee Valley Authority took 12 years just to complete its first phase. The Panama Canal took a decade.

In a follow-up tweet Ezra takes an implicit dig against Biden: "It's hard to run on your $42 billion expansion of broadband when it hasn't expanded broadband. Change is what gets built, not how much money gets appropriated to build." Sure. But what realistic alternative was there? If politicians are willing to support only projects that will be finished in time for reelection, nothing big ever gets done and we'd justifiably mock them for being cynical and short-sighted. At least Biden was never that.

It's the end of another year and that means it's time for some top ten lists. Let's start with my top ten photos of 2024.

Here's an AI chart you probably haven't seen:

After rising through 2019, AI adoption by businesses has been dead flat for the past five years. What's more, the vast bulk of this is old-school "AI" that doesn't deserve the name, not generative AI of the kind that's been the focus of all our attention for the past couple of years. Despite its almost miraculous abilities, we're still struggling to find compelling real-world uses for it.

I've been hearing so much about bird flu lately that I wanted to see how steeply new cases in humans had gone up. It turns out they haven't:

After a big burst in October the number of human cases has steadily dropped off. Is this because there's less bird flu? Or because farm workers are getting vaccinated and wearing more PPE? I don't know.

Vivek Ramaswamy and Mickey Kaus on the "working class struggle":

These two disagree about the causes, but they simply assume that the working class is, indeed, struggling. But it's not true. The past couple of decades haven't been great for anyone, but working class men—which is who everyone is really talking about when they say "working class"—have seen roughly average wage growth:

These earnings are the median of the second quartile, which is right around the 40th percentile. Combine this with a high school education and it's about the purest definition of working class you're going to find.

And what we find is that working class men have done a couple of points better than those with some community college and a couple of points worse than college grads. Over 20 years. The difference is negligible.

But is this because working class men have simply given up and dropped out of the labor force? No:

High school grads have always worked at lower rates than those with more education, but over the past 20 years their participation rate has declined 7.4%. That's better than community college grads and just a hair worse than college grads.

There's more to life than money, and the working class may be suffering in ways that are less obvious: obesity, drugs, discontent over their jobs, etc. Go ahead and make a case if you want to. But on the usual metric of financial comfort, they're (slightly) better off than they were 20 years ago and doing about as well as anyone else. They aren't the victims of any special struggle.

POSTSCRIPT: If you're interested, there has been an era when working class men struggled. It's just not recent and not the one most people think of:

That's "morning in America" in the red box. Working class men were devastated by the Reagan/Bush administrations and made no gains under the Bush Jr. administration. They did well under Clinton and then, following the Great Recession, under Obama, Trump, and Biden. Trump is literally the only Republican president of the past half century who has been good for the working class.

Saturday was astronomy night, so I headed out to the desert to take a picture of the Heart Nebula. I've done this already, but my telescope has too long a focal length (900 mm) to capture the whole thing. All I got was a part of the nebula and you couldn't really tell that it was heart-shaped.

So this time I did a mosaic: four separate images that get stitched together in post-processing. It was a lovely night, but unfortunately not everything went well: it seemed as if the telescope wasn't moving in order to capture the four images. It took me a while to confirm this, and eventually I discovered there was a hidden setting called "Slew to target." But why is this a setting? If you've specifically set things up to take four separate frames, why would you not want to slew to each of them? I still have no idea.

In any case, I fixed that but by then I only had a few hours of darkness left. That meant I got only about 40 minutes per frame, and even on a good night that's not enough to get a really detailed image.

Still, as you can see, it worked. The image is decent, the slewing and stitching worked great, and it's a clear proof of concept that I can do this. I even adjusted the rotation of the camera so that the heart was right side up. At least with this one you can tell where it got its name.