Kevin Drum

The Washington Post says that counties with the highest level of legal opioid use from 2006-2013 (i.e., oxycontin) now have the highest level of fentanyl overdoses:

According to the Post, "The data confirms what’s long been known about the arc of the nation’s addiction crisis: Users first got hooked by pain pills saturating the nation, then turned to cheaper and more readily available street drugs."

I get exasperated at the mindless repetition of "correlation is not causation" from people with no real reason to say it, but in this case I really do doubt the causation that runs from oxy to fentanyl. All this chart shows is that counties with low drug use in 2006 also had low drug use in 2019. Conversely, counties with high drug use in 2006 also had high drug use in 2019. It was just a different drug. But one of the best known findings in illicit drug research is that drug use is faddish. Over the past few decades we've seen waves of crack, followed by marijuana, followed by meth, followed by oxy, and finally followed by fentanyl and heroin.

It's possible that oxy led to fentanyl, but there are also good reasons for the fentanyl crisis to have started around 2014 that are based on chemistry and supply chains and have nothing to do with the oxy crackdown.

I'm not sure what data you'd need to figure out causation here. In the meantime, I'd be a little cautious about accepting the just-so story that says oxy users all switched to fentanyl because they could no longer get their pills.

"Employer costs for employee compensation" is yet another estimate of worker pay from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's based on a quarterly survey of 35,000 observations from 8,500 establishments. For some reason, federal workers aren't included. Here are results through the second quarter of 2023, adjusted for inflation:

In addition to wages, total comp includes health insurance, retirement, vacation pay, employer costs for Social Security and Medicare, and overtime.

Either way—total comp or just wages—the average worker earns less today than in the final quarter before the pandemic started.

Comparing Q2 to Q1 of this year, wages were down at an annual rate of 1.6% while total comp was down 2.7%. This is a sign that the recent uptick in wages may be leveling off.

Here's a chart of PCE core inflation since 2021:

The dashed red line is three months after the American Rescue Plan was passed. This is the absolute earliest it could have affected inflation, and by then the inflation rate had already spiked from 2% to 7%. It's really not plausible that ARP could have caused this.

But did it cause the brief rebound in inflation later in the year? It's possible. But it's more likely that the bulk of the inflationary pressure came from product shortages, as you can see from the very close association between inflation and supply chain pressure. Mike Konczal confirms this in an analysis here. Spending from the various stimulus plans probably had an effect, but not a big one.

Here's yet more evidence of what happens to people who marinate in Fox News, Donald Trump, talk radio, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They go cuckoo:

Republican voters are increasingly anxious about COVID amid a swirl of unfounded claims on the right that the federal government is preparing a mass reimposition of restrictions. At a New Hampshire focus group of Republicans commissioned by the political podcast Breaking Points and reviewed by Semafor, five of the eight participants said they believed there was some connection between the recent rise of COVID cases and associated restrictions and the upcoming election being “rigged” for Democrats.

“With the ‘plandemic,’ we see it coming again, and there’s a lot of writing on the wall,” one voter said.

Five out of eight! But how does this make sense, even to an unhinged mind? The theory here is—what? There's an election coming up, so Democrats are seeding the air with COVID and secretly planning to impose a big batch of wildly unpopular restrictions? This does not strike me as a campaign strategy bound for success.

God help me, I also googled "plandemic" and discovered it's a viral video released a few weeks after COVID hit American shores in 2020. It says that the virus was deliberately created in order to enrich the—oh, forget it. It's just a hodgepodge of miscellaneous conspiracy theories. You can google it yourself if you just have to know the grim details.

This is a mosaic on the ceiling of Sacré Coeur Basilica in Paris.

Good news for workers in California:

Fast-food companies agreed over the weekend to pull a California referendum off next year’s ballot that sought to reverse a landmark worker-protections law, forgoing a costly political fight with labor unions over employee pay.

The deal will result in an increase in the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 per hour in April and form a new council of representatives for workers and companies to consider pay bumps in the future, according to sources involved in the negotiations.

Since I'm a bug about inflation, it's worth noting that the $15 minimum wage movement started in 2012. Adjusted for inflation, that comes to.......$20 in 2023.

In other words, it took a while but in California fast food workers finally have the minimum wage they were fighting for a decade ago.

*In 2012 dollars, that is.

Over at National Review, John Noonan condemns the fact that we have failed to evacuate every last Afghan who ever worked for the United States:

In our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan — perhaps the most cynical display of national treachery I have witnessed in my lifetime — we left behind multitudes of innocent Afghans who trusted America, who worked with Americans, who risked their lives as interpreters assigned to U.S. rifle companies, who braved the Taliban by teaching little girls how to read, and who were betrayed.

We gave them our word and we broke it. To this day, no one has apologized to them. Few have offered to help. The president still claims his evacuation was a success, if and when he talks about Afghanistan at all.

National treachery? We were in Afghanistan for more than 20 years and we accomplished virtually nothing. How long should we have stayed? The military recommended that we keep 2,500 soldiers there, but that's a joke. It takes 100,000 troops or more to have any real effect on the country, and no one, Democrat or Republican, was in favor of that. The Taliban was ascendant whether we liked it or not, and withdrawal was our only choice.

As for the Afghans, we evacuated about 120,000 of them. That's a helluva lot. As painful as it is to say this, I don't think we ever promised to evacuate every single Afghan who ever helped us, and I don't think that would have been feasible anyway. It's just not something we could have done.

If you want to argue that we should have stayed in Afghanistan in force forever, fine. Make that case. But be prepared for not having many people on your side. In the real world, withdrawal was the only real option in 2021; the operation went about as smoothly as anyone could hope; and we rescued lots of Afghans from the Taliban. It's a tragedy that the Taliban is back in power, and it's a tragedy that we couldn't evacuate everyone who might be a Taliban target. But the truth is there was very little we could do about that. In light of that reality, the Afghanistan withdrawal was as much of a success as it possibly could have been.

Tyler Cowen points to a chart from Ted Gioia and Chris Dalla Riva that shows the share of popular songs written in a minor key:

"Why is music getting sadder?" asks Gioia, but I'm not sure I agree with the premise. It's true that minor keys are associated with sadness, but they shouldn't be. I find minor key tunes tunes, both classical and popular, to be more soulful and more interesting than major key tunes, perhaps, but not necessarily sad.

Gioia tries to associate this trend with recent news showing that teens have become sadder in recent years, but the timing doesn't fit. Minor keys have been rising since the '60s—before the whole teen depression thing started—and have been flat since 2011, which is exactly when you'd expect it to rise most steeply.

Key signatures aside, there's still the question of whether modern pop music is, in fact, sadder than usual, and on that I have no opinion since I don't listen to modern pop music. But that's because I mostly find it boring, not sad.

Ross Douthat joins a cast of millions today to ask:

Why Is Joe Biden So Unpopular?

The answer is: he's not. How often do I have to post this chart before the message gets through? Here are our last four presidents at week 133 of their first terms:¹

¹Excluding George W. Bush, as usual, because of his 9/11 bump.

A new poll says that only 28% of Californians support cash reparations for Black residents. But this number is fairly meaningless because it masks partisan differences that are even bigger than usual:

• Democrats: 43% support
• Republicans: 3% support

I myself have long believed that cash reparations are a misguided idea. I have four primary reasons:

1. Equal treatment: The goal of civil rights is equal treatment for all. This is by far the biggest problem facing Black people in America and cash reparations do nothing to advance this goal. It could even make things worse if white people decide that paying reparations ends their obligation to improve treatment of the Black community.
2. Details matter: Who get reparations? Adults? Children? Only those who can prove they're descended from slaves? Former presidents of the United States? Half pay for those of mixed race? You can't just hand wave this away. Get it wrong and it will tear the Black community apart.
3. Education: I've long believed that education is the single biggest key to equal treatment. On average, Black kids leave high school two or three grade levels behind white kids, and equal treatment is all but impossible until we fix this. If we're going to spend large sums of money, this is where it should go.
   .
   
4. Do the math: The California reparations task force recommended payments of at least $1.4 million per person. If you extend this to the entire country it comes to $63 trillion. This is ten times the federal budget and is obviously a nonstarter even if you spread payments out over a decade.
   .
   So what would be affordable? If we settled on $100,000—which comes nowhere near making Black people whole—it would cost about $4.5 trillion. That's $450 billion annually over ten years, which is just barely in the realm of the plausible.
   .
   In other words, the outside maximum would be a fairly piddling amount ($10,000 per year for a decade) that wouldn't do much to change people's lives. It would almost certainly be spent fairly quickly on ordinary, day-to-day necessities and that would be that.

In summary: Cash reparations probably wouldn't solve any problems; might make things worse; and are unaffordable except in paltry amounts. In the end, Black people would get a small amount of money but would still be poorly educated and treated like crap. Absolutely no one, Black or white, would be satisfied with this. That's why I don't support them.