Kevin Drum

UPDATE: This turns out to be a lab screwup. Ignore it. Actual results here.

Today brings some very good news indeed—I think:

According to my latest lab tests, I no longer have any detectable level of M-protein. This is unexpected, since in June it seemed as if my CAR-T response had plateaued. But no. I'm just a slowpoke. Instead of the usual six weeks to a complete cure, it took me five months.

But I'm not quite ready to celebrate yet. When the test results came back, there was no report of M-protein at all. After some annoying back-and-forth with my doctor's office, I finally got a note saying that the lab doesn't return a result if no M-protein is detected. I'm just a little bit dubious of this, so I'm going to wait for next month's results before I feel absolutely sure that the cancer is gone.

That said: I'm apparently cancer free! No more multiple myeloma. I've had a "complete" response to the CAR-T, and further tests down the road related to something called kappa and lambda light free chains will tell me if I've had a "stringent complete" response—the best possible.

This is not likely to be a permanent remission, since "undetectable" doesn't actually mean zero, but it should keep me free of multiple myeloma for at least two or three years without chemotherapy. Hooray!

The Border Patrol has finally deigned to release its August numbers, waiting until about 5 pm on a Friday to do it. I can only assume that's because the numbers, once again, were bad:

Border encounters were up 27% to 233,000 in August. About 50,000 of these were legal asylum requests while the rest were illegal crossings between ports of entry.

CBP is very bad at releasing the statistics people might actually be interested in. For example, the theory behind President Biden's border policy is that if you apply legally for asylum, well and good. But if you cross the border illegally and then ask for asylum you will be put on a fast track for deportation. So how many illegal immigrants are being quickly sent back to Mexico? Here's what CBP has to say:

Since May 2023, DHS has repatriated over 250,000 individuals, including more than 36,000 individual family members. DHS has removed or returned more individual family members in the last four months than in any previous full fiscal year.

That sounds nice, but would it kill them to provide numbers for this going back a few years? That would give us a better idea of the net number of people who are entering the country and staying, versus those who are merely "encountered" and then sent back.

But they don't do that, so I have no idea whether Biden's policy is working. CBP is certainly implying that it works, but concrete numbers just aren't there.

Why has the number of people getting married collapsed over the past 60 or so years?

Advice to conservatives who want to convince liberals to talk up marriage:

The key persuasion (if you do actually want to persuade) strategy here is to clarify that you’re talking about hectoring *men* not women.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 22, 2023

This is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but worth responding to. There are two hypotheses here. Hypothesis #1 is that the decline of marriage has something to do with men, who have gotten worse and more feckless over the years. But that's not really so:

This is no great shakes—it averages to less than 1% growth per year—but neither does it suggest that men have become unreliable sluggards. It's true that fewer men are working these days than in 1950, but even so about 90% of all prime-age men participate in the labor force. That's nowhere near a big enough drop to explain the collapse of marriage.

But might the decline in marriage be the consequence of some non-financial failing among men? Sure, anything is possible. But all the evidence suggests that, overall, both men and women have gotten generally better over the years, not worse. The idea that modern men are uniquely unmarriageable is mostly just a historically blinkered view that plays down how crappy men have always been.

No, the answer is almost certainly Hypothesis #2: it has something to do with women. Does it ever:

Starting in the '50s for Black women—and then really taking off around 1963—incomes skyrocketed. This same thing happened among white women, but it started later and their incomes didn't increase as much. This is consistent with (a) women rejecting marriage when they started to make enough money to get along on their own, and (b) Black women rejecting marriage earlier and more strongly than white women.

Were social pressures also involved? Did marriage start to decline only when society started to accept single motherhood?

Probably. But it's worth noting that this started among Black women in the '50s, before the counterculture revolution of the '60s but after they started earning more money. So it may be that causality worked the other way: as women made more money they ditched men in greater numbers, and as that happened society slowly adapted.

In any case, I'd guess that the conventional wisdom is correct on this: marriage declined because women became self-supporting and could raise children on their own if they wanted to. And many of them wanted to.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, did you know that Black women caught up to white women years ago and today earn as much as they do?

On average, Black men still earn 25% less than white men.

Why is it that union organizing drives so often fail? Brutal opposition from management is one reason, but another is simply that a lot of workers don't feel they'd get any benefit from belonging to a union. That's wrong:

These are the latest estimates from the BLS, and they show pretty clearly that in addition to better pay, union members also have considerably greater access to benefits. I don't imagine this comes as a surprise to anyone, but sometimes it's nice to see the actual numbers.

After a long day of eating and snoozing, Hilbert can't be bothered to actually get up on his feet and chase around a toy on a string. Last night he wouldn't even go so far as to roll over. But if you wave it right in front of him he will deign to wave his paws at it.

He is not always this lazy. But sometimes he is.

Every year the Koch brothers—or brother, since David Koch died—hold a big donor meeting in Palm Springs. It's an explicitly political event that typically raises hundreds of millions of dollars for conservative and libertarian causes.

In other words, it's not really the place for a Supreme Court justice. But that kind of thinking has never stopped Clarence Thomas:

Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice was brought in to speak, staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.

That puts Thomas in the extraordinary position of having served as a fundraising draw for a network that has brought cases before the Supreme Court, including one of the most closely watched of the upcoming term.

Thomas never reported the 2018 flight to Palm Springs on his annual financial disclosure form, an apparent violation of federal law requiring justices to report most gifts. A Koch network spokesperson said the network did not pay for the private jet. Since Thomas didn’t disclose it, it’s not clear who did pay.

Back in the day, it wasn't unusual for Supreme Court justices to hobnob with senators and presidents and discuss the issues of the day with them. We'd like to think we've gotten beyond that in our more enlightened era, but apparently not. At least not in the case of Clarence Thomas.

Of course, maybe he'll recuse himself in cases that involve the Koch network. That would certainly impr—ha ha. Just kidding. Of course he won't recuse himself. Let's not be silly.

Just to remind everyone, here's the basic shape of the federal budget:

The orange line is the one that has Republicans tearing each other apart. It is lower today than it was in 1980, and about the same as it was in 1990, 2000, and 2010. But for some reason it's an intolerable problem.

In fact, discretionary spending isn't a problem. It's been slowly but steadily declining for decades. What's more, there's simply not very much there to cut, even in the fever dreams of hardcore right-wingers. Even the zealots in the House Freedom Caucus, for example, are demanding only $120 billion in spending cuts. That's a lot, but it's less than a tenth the size of the federal deficit. It's a pinprick.

If you're serious about reining in the federal deficit, you have two choices:

• Take a meat axe to mandatory spending. This means big cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a few other smaller entitlement programs.
  .
  or
  .
• Raise taxes. This means repealing both of the Bush tax cuts and probably the Trump tax cut too.

That's it. Unless you want to continue living in fantasyland, those are your only choices. It doesn't matter if you hate them both. This is all we've got.

Here's a headline from the Washington Post today:

Return to the office? These workers quit instead.

At the risk of being a bit of a dick, the text of the story really doesn't back this up. Here's a summary of the people interviewed in this piece:

• Example #1: Quit because they live in Brooklyn and were reassigned to Los Angeles.
• Example #2: Quit because her husband landed a job so she had to stay home and take care of the kids.
• Example #3: Quit because she got divorced and couldn't afford the commute any longer.
• Example #4: Actually did quit solely because of a return-to-office mandate (got tired of the long commute).
• Example #5: Quit because the company wanted him to relocate.
• Example #6: Quit because her reports lived in London and Singapore and she got tired of trying schedule Zoom meetings.

All of these are related in vagueish ways to remote work, but only one person truly quit solely over a mandate to report back to the office. Of the others, two are relocations; two are changes in personal circumstances; and one got tired of Zoom.

If so many people are quitting over return-to-office mandates, it ought to be easy to find half a dozen clear-cut examples. But apparently it's not, and that makes me wonder if there really are lots of people quitting over work mandates.

POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that people have long chosen jobs based on specific needs for flexibility. This is still happening, but has nothing special to do with either COVID or remote work.

Vox writes about our recent increase in traffic deaths:

According to a 2021 survey of over 1,000 police officers, nearly 60 percent said they were less likely to stop a vehicle for violating traffic laws than they were prior to 2020, when the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police inspired nationwide protests over police brutality, and the pandemic disrupted usual enforcement practices.

....The fact that traffic stops are decreasing while deaths are rising doesn’t necessarily mean that one is causing the other, because correlation does not equal causation, as any good statistics teacher will tell you....Some experts, however, think there’s an obvious link. Enforcement efforts that are high-visibility and focused on safety are shown to reduce risky driving. Experts believe the opposite might also be true.

Here's the problem: this doesn't match the data. Here are traffic fatalities over the past ten years:

Traffic fatalities jumped suddenly in the second quarter of 2020 and then flattened out at their new higher level.

It's possible this is related to the George Floyd protests, but it seems unlikely since those protests only started at the tail end of the second quarter of 2020. Nor is it likely related to fewer traffic stops. Those didn't suddenly drop off in the second quarter of 2020 and, in any case, can't have an effect until drivers realize that enforcement is down. That takes a while.

By far the most likely explanation is COVID, which exploded precisely in the second quarter of 2020. But why? Why did COVID suddenly make us into reckless drivers? And why have we remained reckless drivers even as COVID has waned?

The truth is that none of this really makes sense. It's unlikely that the sudden spike in traffic deaths has anything to do with George Floyd, and it's more or less impossible that it has anything to do with reductions in traffic stops. It is likely that it's related to COVID, but that just pushes the question a level deeper. What does COVID have to do with driving?

This is, for now, an unsolved mystery.

Grape juice lupine by the side of the road near Palm Springs.