Kevin Drum

Dan Wang writes this week about Xi Jinping's increasing obsession with controlling every aspect of Chinese society and the impact this has on the already parlous state of China's technology sector:

The general political environment poses perhaps the greatest threat to technological momentum....I grow less certain that a third-Xi term China will sustain an innovative drive.

A lot of entrepreneurial Chinese are unsure too. The most startling news story I read this year is that rising numbers of Chinese nationals are being apprehended at the Mexican border, trying to make the crossing into the United States. I had not imagined that some Chinese would find such a harrowing trip to be worthwhile. That comes on top of the well-reported trend that many Chinese entrepreneurs have decamped to other markets. In the last few months, I’ve chatted with a good number of Chinese undergrads in the US, who almost to a person tell me that their parents are urging them not to return to the mainland. These groups make up a miniscule percentage of China’s population. But tech development depends on them too.

This dim view of China's technological progress shows up in patent activity as well. We've all seen the charts showing Chinese patent applications skyrocketing, but those are badly misleading for two reasons. First, China employs a subsidy system that encourages inventors to file meaningless patent applications, which results in impressive but ultimately hollow numbers. What matters is patents granted. Second, unlike the US, China grants a very large number of design and "utility" (i.e., small incremental) patents. But the patents that matter are "invention" patents. Here's what that looks like:

The US grants four times as many serious patents as China. What's more, US patents are of far higher quality:

Another measure of patent quality also leaves China far behind the US:

Only 4.17 percent of 1.2 million Chinese patent applications were filed overseas, and 6.31 percent of the total patents were granted in foreign countries. Conversely, 43.40 percent of 521,802 U.S. patent applications were filed overseas, and 48.10 percent of the total patents were granted in foreign countries.

There are several reasons why Chinese companies file so few foreign patents, but one is that China's lower-quality patents are unlikely to withstand international evaluation.

If you put all this together, China doesn't look like a technological powerhouse. They have plenty of world class research, but it's focused in very specific areas that are often mandated by the central government, leaving important areas such as biotech, AI, and semiconductors as backwaters. As with so many things China, a dynamic facade disguises the fact that it's basically still a developing country and the US remains about six times wealthier and more productive.

In the Washington Post, David Byler shows us how often people decide to change their self-identified race:

About 14% of Hispanics switch to white, as do 26% of multiracial folks.

The multiracial category is fairly small, so the switchers don't affect the overall racial picture much. But that's not the case for Hispanics, who make up 19% of the total US population. If 14% of them switch to white, that's about 2.5% of the entire population choosing to switch from Hispanic to white.

Byler points out that this is good news for conservatives, since those who switch to white are more likely to vote Republican. In fact, they're more likely to vote for conservative Republicans. And these days, 2.5% is more than enough to tip an election one way or another. This is hardly the biggest electoral issue of our time, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Here is Donald Trump's support in the Republican primary since the beginning of 2022:

Trump's level of support is bafflingly steady. He routinely blurts out absurdities and nothing happens. He gets indicted twice and nothing happens. Ron DeSantis enters the race and nothing happens. His mental acuity shows obvious signs of decline and nothing happens.

If none of this stuff affects him even slightly, his support must depend on something else. But what? His policy positions are unremarkable. His anti-wokeness is moderate by modern Republican standards. His applause lines are old and kind of stale.

So what precisely is it that motivates so many Republicans to support him through thick and thin? These aren't just MAGA Republicans, after all. There are too many of them. They span the gamut from MAGA to moderate. And their support never wavers.

So what is it? Why do so many ordinary Republicans stick to Trump like glue? What's the attraction? I know it seems kind of late in the day to be asking this, but there really is an enigma here that's never quite been fully answered. Maybe we'll never know.

CBP released border encounter numbers for June today, and they're down a lot from last month:

The June decline is fairly typical for the start of summer, so there's no telling yet if it's temporary or not. Of the 145,000 border encounters in June, about 45,000 were asylum requests and 100,000 were attempts to cross the border illegally.

With Title 42 gone, asylum requests are now mostly handled via the CBP-One mobile app. CBP has announced that they will accept about 40,000 appointments per month via the app.

Earlier today I posted a chart showing that in-person classes were canceled at higher rates for poor kids compared to richer kids during the early days of the COVID pandemic. The same was true for Black vs. white students and for students with high-school educated parents.

My assumption, naturally, was that this all happened for the usual reason: we just don't care that much about poor Black kids, so they get the short end of the stick. But it turns out that probably isn't true. The real reason for the difference is that poor parents—and Black parents and non-college parents—actively preferred remote learning. They didn't want their kids returning to classrooms during the pandemic.

To a large extent, classrooms were re-opened in richer, whiter schools because that's what parents pressured administrators to do. Likewise, they were kept closed in poorer, blacker schools because that's what those parents pressured administrators to do.

I don't know the reason for this, though I've read anecdotally that many Black parents were relieved to get their kids out of schools where they were anxious and troubled. They reported that their children were calmer and happier once they were away from their toxic school environment.

There's more detail about this here. The upshot is that different rates of school closure don't seem to be the fault of unions or Democratic governors or woke activists. Those might play a modest role, but it mostly seems to be the simple result of parent preference. When parents wanted the schools open, they stayed open. When they wanted them closed, they were closed.

Bottles of Benriach at La Maison de Whisky in Paris. The shop is in the Madeleine district and we passed it whenever we walked out toward the Place de la Concorde.

Donald Trump wants Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis tossed off the investigation of Trump's attempt to change the presidential vote in Georgia. He also wants to quash the grand jury report into his actions. He has precisely no good argument to make in either case, but he nevertheless went straight to the state Supreme Court to get it done. It was typical Trump legal overreach, and even though eight of the nine justices are Republicans they were still annoyed by Trump's obvious attempt at an end run around the Superior Court. So they unanimously told him to fuck off with extreme prejudice:

The Court has made clear that a petitioner cannot invoke this Court’s original jurisdiction as a way to circumvent the ordinary channels for obtaining the relief he seeks without making some showing that he is being prevented fair access to those ordinary channels. Petitioner’s claim fails in the light of that precedent; he makes no showing that he has been prevented fair access to the ordinary channels.

....With regard to Petitioner’s request to disqualify Willis from representing any party in any and all proceedings involving him, we note only that Petitioner has not presented in his original petition either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Willis’s disqualification by this Court at this time on this record.

Too bad, Donald. Willis is going to indict you and then you'll have three separate court cases to fight—one for corporate corruption, one for national security violations, and one for election fraud. And maybe even a fourth for inciting the January 6 insurrection. That's quite the variety pack. It's not going to be pretty, but then, you should have thought of that before breaking the law so much. Now it's finally catching up.

This is a few months old, but it's nonetheless instructive. It shows the percentage of school classes that were closed at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. It turns out that administrators were far more willing to cancel classes outright in poor neighborhoods than in rich neighborhoods:

As you might expect, you get the same results for kids from less educated families, as well as for Black vs. white kids. If you're poor, Black, and your parents don't have a college degree, the odds are pretty good that your class was canceled during the early days of the pandemic and eventually replaced with remote instruction.

Rich kids also transitioned to remote learning sooner, and, of course, computers were more available to rich kids than poor kids.

Everyone suffered learning losses during the pandemic, but this research shows part of the reason that poor kids suffered the most. It's because we ignored them more than rich kids.

UPDATE: Actually, this probably happened because poor parents, Black parents, and non-college educated parents actively preferred school closures during the pandemic. More here.

It's hot. Death Valley is recording temps of 120°F at night. A town in central Spain set a European record of 140°F. Last week saw three days in a row of the hottest global temperatures in modern history. Phoenix has recorded 18 consecutive days over 110°F. Just west of the Gobi Desert, China's Flaming Mountain reached a surface temperature of 176°F.

Is this just one of those things? Hardly. Here's what NOAA has to say about the growth of US heat waves over the past half century:

In the 1960s, we could expect maybe two heat waves of three days each in a typical year. Today we can expect six heat waves of four days each. The overall summer heat wave season has tripled from 20 days to 70 days.

If you wish, you're welcome to pretend this is just the normal variability of climate. Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's cold.

But that would make you an idiot. This is all due to global warming, and it's an excellent example of how a smallish change in average temperature can produce massive extremes at the edges. The same phenomenon is at work with sea level changes, where a modest change of just a few inches can produce killer storm surges.

A dozen years ago I wrote:

The fact of climate change will become undeniable [by 2024]. The effects of global warming, discernible today mostly in scary charts and mathematical models, will start to become obvious enough in the real world that even the rightest of right wingers will be forced to acknowledge what’s happening.

I got the first sentence dead on. But I'm still not sure about the second. Right wingers have turned out to be far more stubborn than anyone could have imagined.

Earlier today I was browsing through a Wall Street Journal piece headlined, "Europeans Are Becoming Poorer." The basic theme is that the US has recovered from the pandemic better than Europe, and that's true enough. But the more I read, the fishier things got. The numbers were all over the map and weren't adjusted for inflation, which is crazy during a time when inflation is running high and makes a real difference in cross-country comparisons. Some of the numbers seemed wildly too pessimistic. Finally, when I ran into the phrase, "the pauperization of Europe," I'd had enough. Here are five charts that show how Europe is really doing.

First up is consumption over the long term:

The US is higher than most of Europe, but the broad growth rates are similar. The Journal piece makes a point of claiming that European consumption has "stalled" since 2008, so here's that:

Over this timeframe, consumption growth in Europe has been better than the US. Now let's zoom in specifically on the period since the pandemic, which is the main focus of the Journal piece. Here is real GDP growth over the past three years:

The US is the strongest performer, but most of Europe is doing OK, not getting poorer. Only Germany and the UK are doing really badly—and in the case of Germany this is a minor adjustment after many years of extremely high growth. Here is consumption:

Again, the US is on top and much of Europe is down but hardly impoverished. The EU as a whole is up 0.2%, which is no great shakes but neither is it negative. Finally, here's household income:¹

The Journal seems to think the US has seen strong income growth lately, but nothing could be further from the truth. Adjusted for inflation, earnings are nearly flat since the beginning of the pandemic while earnings in Europe are up 1.6%.

Nickel summary: US growth has been considerably stronger than in Europe, but income growth has been weaker. For its part, European growth has been sluggish, but it hasn't gone down and the continent is a long way from being "pauperized." I mean, come on.

¹This is a smallish set of countries because I was limited to those that have reported 2022 income.