Kevin Drum

In 2021, when inflation started to take off, there were two opposing sides: Team Transitory and Team Structural. In particular, Team Transitory believed that taming inflation didn't need a lot of help from the Fed because it was fundamentally the result of temporary pandemic supply shocks that would fade on their own.

I've been on Team Transitory consistently from the start because I think nearly every scrap of evidence points in that direction. But every single member of Team Transitory—including, ironically, me—made a big mistake. We forgot Kevin's Law: "Everything takes longer than you think."

This law holds for a startling range of seemingly unrelated human activity: house building; software development; World War I; housing bubbles; artificial intelligence; planning a party; and on and on and on. It's almost like some kind of cosmic law of nature meant to mock us.

In any case, our initial notion that the inflationary burst would last nine months or so was laughable. We all should have known better. There's absolutely no support in the historical record for such a short inflationary episode in the US:¹

Transitory or not, there was never any chance that the pandemic inflation episode would last nine months. It was always going to last a couple of years, and sure enough it has.

¹Episode lengths are measured over the time it takes to get above 4% and then back down below 4%. I fudged slightly to distinguish the 1974 and 1980 episodes.

Rep. Eli Crane, who looks and sounds disturbingly like a Batman villain, yesterday introduced an anti-woke amendment to the military funding bill that would prohibit "race, gender, religion, or political affiliations, or any other ideological concepts as the sole basis for recruitment, training education, promotion, or retention decisions." Then he dug himself a further hole by saying his amendment had nothing to do with "colored people."

Well, shit happens, I guess. But perhaps Crane would be interested in knowing just how diverse the Army is right now. It turns out that (a) it is 85% male, (b) white people have been leaving in droves, down from 62% of all active duty members in 2010 to only 54% today—replaced mostly by Hispanic and Asian recruits, and (c) the upper officer ranks remain pretty solidly white:

In case you're interested in the very upper ranks, there are 247 white generals, 36 Black generals, 4 Hispanic generals, and 4 Asian generals.

I was under the impression that Twitter had lost most of its ad revenue, but I guess it's using whatever's left to reward some of its star content creators:

On Thursday, Twitter announced that it would begin sharing ad revenue with content creators on its platform for the first time.....The first beneficiaries appear to be high-profile far-right influencers who tweeted before the announcement how much they’ve earned as part of the program. Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson and Ashley St. Claire all touted their earnings.

....So far, the influencers who have publicly revealed that they’re part of the program are prominent figures on the right. Andrew Tate, for example, who was recently released from jail on rape and human trafficking charges, posted that he’d been paid over $20,000 by Twitter.

I'm sure this is a coincidence, just like Tucker Carlson's new Twitter-based venture and the launch of Ron DeSantis's campaign on Twitter—not to mention the whole Twitter Files fiasco. In any case, the program has apparently generated some fallout because there are still some right-wing cranks who aren't getting paid and aren't happy about it.

Twitter claims that payments are based on impressions and replies, but a former executive says this is bullshit:

One former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships and who asked to remain unnamed to avoid retaliation, said that, “any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model. This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

The former Twitter executive also cast doubt on Twitter’s revamped metrics, including impressions. “The numbers are totally and completely bogus,” she said. “It’s all completely made up. It really feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy.”

There you have it. Andrew Tate is getting paid and you aren't. Take that, libtards.

Are you in the mood for some rare optimistic climate news? The Rocky Mountain Institute released a report today forecasting that solar and wind are growing so fast and getting so cheap that they're now on track to produce 30% of all electricity by 2030 and upwards of 70-85% by 2050:

If we can do this, we'd be at net zero emissions by 2050, and RMI thinks it's well within reason. That's still not enough to rein in global warming completely, since there's more to emissions than just electricity, but it would certainly be a helluva start.

Excess mortality is generally considered a better guide to COVID deaths than actual counts of COVID deaths themselves, which are subject to considerable interpretation and dispute. Here are the excess mortality rates for Scandinavia, the US, and a bunch of large European countries:

Sweden is at the very bottom. There's only one country that's noticeably lower. Whatever Sweden did, it seems to have worked tolerably well.

Last year Florida lobbed a tactical nuke at groups that register voters by dramatically raising the fines when they make mistakes—like delivering forms late or to the wrong county. Today the Guardian tells us that in less than nine months Florida has collected more than $100,000 in fines, 80% of which have come from three lefty groups: Hard Knocks, the Hispanic Federation, and Poder Latinx. Hard Knocks is suspicious:

“Are voter registration organizations on the right being targeted as aggressively and frequently in Florida as those seeking to register voters of color and other underrepresented communities? Given Governor DeSantis’ track record, that question may be rhetorical.”

In 2019, independent registration drives signed up more than 60,000 new voters. Halfway through this year the number is barely over 2,000. That's mission accomplished for Ron DeSantis, who knows perfectly well that voter registration has always been a strongly Democratic priority, especially among voters of color.

The New York Post cherry picks a few quotes today to imply that Disney CEO Bob Iger isn't happy about going to battle with Ron DeSantis in Florida:

“The last thing I want is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars,” he told CNBC of Disney’s First Amendment case against DeSantis that was filed in April, which has since escalated into a row of warring lawsuits.

“I’m not sure that was handled very well,” Iger told CNBC of Disney’s response to DeSantis’ hotly-debated legislation that has been branded by critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” which was signed into law in March of 2022.

Over at National Review, Brendan Michael Dougherty takes it a step or three further:

Disney CEO: DeSantis Beat Us

What we should not be hearing after today are arguments that Disney won the battle with DeSantis. Disney is telling us, plain as day: This fight was a loss and should never have been fought at all.

I wouldn't have given this another thought if I hadn't run into a Politico headline and story about Iger's interview:

Disney CEO responds to DeSantis: ‘Preposterous’ that company is sexualizing kids

Disney CEO Bob Iger hit back at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday for starting a highly dramatized public fight against the entertainment giant....He also gave a full-throated endorsement of Disney’s ongoing lawsuit against the Florida governor, in which the California-based company accuses DeSantis of weaponizing his political power.

....“It’s concerning to me that anyone would encourage a level of intolerance or even hate that frankly could even become dangerous action. The notion that Disney is in any way sexualizing children, quite frankly, is preposterous and inaccurate,” Iger added.

....“Frankly, the company was within its right — even though I’m not sure it was handled very well — was within its right to speak up on an issue, constitutionally protected right of free speech,” Iger said Thursday. “To retaliate against the company in a way that would be harmful to the business was not something we could sit back and tolerate.”

I realize that this should probably be filed under "Who cares?" but for some reason it struck me as an especially egregious example of the intense desire so many people have to misrepresent things even when they're easily checkable. Hell, the Iger interview was on CNBC. Lots of people saw it, and it's obvious that Iger wasn't backing down, wasn't saying Disney had lost, and wasn't claiming they never should have fought back. He was saying exactly the opposite. What's the point of pretending otherwise?

The top photo shows the sun setting over a Marine Corps construction project on the beach at Camp Pendleton. The project is a bunch of concrete boxes, and I don't know what they're for. Urban warfare exercises?

The bottom photo is the same scene but from a different angle. The big cloud on the left is the famous Southern California marine layer rolling in. Within a couple of minutes it had made its way to me and I was completely socked in.

In the New York Times today, Laura Beamer and Marshall Steinbaum write about the catastrophe of America's student loan epidemic:

America’s Student Loans Were Never Going to Be Repaid

In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren’t making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on the principal....We predict that most of the outstanding balances — not to mention the roughly $100 billion in new loans issued every year — won’t ever be repaid.

This whole piece is full of weird, mismatched statistics that are designed more to confuse than enlighten—always a sure tip-off that something is fishy. So here are two super-simple pieces of data about student loans. The first contains estimates from the Education Data Initiative:

The vast majority of students with loans attend public universities. On average, it takes them 4-5 years to pay off their loans for an AA or bachelor's degree. A master's degree takes longer. There is no sign here that paying off a student loan is some kind of impossible task.

The second chart comes from the New York Fed, which tracks delinquency rates for student loans. I've inverted that to show how many students remain current on their repayment schedule:

Transition into delinquency has risen slightly over the past two decades to 9%, which means that 91% of borrowers remain current. Again, this is not a sign that student loans are impossible to pay off.

As Beamer and Steinbaum acknowledge, repayment varies considerably between various groups. The poorest obviously have the hardest time. Those who take out loans to get worthless "degrees" from for-profit trade schools are often in bad shape. And students who take out loans but then never finish school—and therefore lack the extra income they hoped for from a college degree—have difficulties too.

All that said, student loans on average are burdensome but not catastrophic for most people. There are some targeted actions we could and probably should take for the worst off, but broadly speaking, student loans just don't deserve the panic they often provoke.

It's been a long time coming, but the FDA has finally approved an oral contraceptive you can get without a prescription. The US is now one of the dozens of countries that either formally or informally allow women to buy contraceptives over the counter:

The reason for approving OTC contraceptives is simple. First, they're safe. Second, contraceptives are more likely to get used if women don't have to get them routinely re-prescribed:

An El Paso study showed that women were less likely to stop using contraceptives if they could buy them over the counter. A California study showed that both unplanned pregnancies and abortions went down significantly among women given a 1-year supply of contraceptives instead of continual 1-month supplies.

The particular contraceptive approved today is called Opill, and will be available next year. Hopefully others will follow.