Cats, charts, and politics
I am amused by this chart on international obesity rates:
Every country in the top 15 uses weights based on measured data. But what happens when you ask people to self-report their weights (red asterisks in the chart)? Their countries all end up in the bottom 20.
This is why anything based on self-reporting should be taken skeptically. It's not always wrong to use self-reported data if it's done carefully, but it's always likely to be biased by all the usual foibles of human nature.
This is what poor old Notre Dame looks like these days. Maybe if we come back to Paris for the Olympics they'll have it all fixed up for us.
John Herrman says that Amazon still works pretty well for most people:
But, at the core of that experience, something has become unignorably worse. Late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon’s customer satisfaction had fallen sharply in a range of recent surveys, which cited COVID-related delivery interruptions but also poor search results and “low-quality” items. More products are junk. The interface itself is full of junk. The various systems on which customers depend (reviews, search results, recommendations) feel like junk. This is the state of the art of American e-commerce, a dominant force in the future of buying things. Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? Maybe it’s slipping, showing its age, and settling into complacency. Or maybe — hear me out — everything is going according to plan.
Quite so. My own gripe is that Amazon's search interface just flatly doesn't work. Herrman starts his piece with an example: looking for a spatula. That should be no problem, and generally speaking it's not. Type in "spatula" and you'll get loads of people selling spatulas. But type in "metal spatula" and . . .
OK, I just did this and it worked fine. The first three pages of search results were exclusively metal spatulas.
Fine. But trust me, this is not always the case. Last night, for example, I searched for oversize blankets. But even when I used Amazon's own suggested search terms, no more than 20% of the results—I'm being generous here—were actually oversize. The rest were just ordinary blankets of an ordinary size. When I added "cotton" to the search, only about half the results were cotton.
I am savvy enough to ignore all the sponsored results, since I know they'll show up if they're even in the same ballpark as my search terms. But even the normal results don't match your search most of the time.
But here's the thing: I did, eventually, find a couple of blankets that fit my search. I was annoyed that it took so long to click through all the junk, but really, I only spent five or ten minutes. And if it weren't for e-commerce, there's a good chance I'd never have found what I was looking for even if I'd spent all day running around town to various sellers of household goods.
So Amazon has a huge array of products that produces a very long tail. This means that even if you're looking for something unusual you can probably find it. But that huge array also means it might take a while to sort through the junk. Easy come, easy go.
The Wall Street Journal reports today that "The U.S. Consumer Is Starting to Freak Out." Let's take a look!
Spending on durable goods, like cars and washing machines, soared during the pandemic and has since flattened out. But it's still way above its pre-pandemic level.
Spending on nondurable goods, like clothes and food, also declined slightly last year, but remains well above its pre-pandemic level.
Housing— Well, we all know what's happening to housing. As it happens, spending on housing has increased over the past six months because housing prices have gone up enough to make up for reduced buying.
Finally, we have non-housing services, which account for half of all spending. And it's increasing! It's still slightly below its pre-pandemic trend, but over the past 18 months it's been slowly getting there.
So are US consumers freaking out? Personally, I think they should be, but there's little evidence of it. Durable goods are reverting down to the mean while services are reverting up to the mean. Looking to the future, however, the big question mark is household savings. Households bulked up their savings during the pandemic thanks to federal stimulus checks, but have been spending that down ever since:
The good news is that savings went up in the fourth quarter and that only barely affected consumption.
It really doesn't look to me like consumers are freaking out. In fact, if you ask me, they're a little too complacent. But that all depends on whether you think we're headed for a recession later this year or if you're a soft-landing optimist. I'm the former.
"Defund the police" may be a rallying cry for some, but what's happened in real life? Just the opposite:
The data for 2021-22 represents my best estimate put together from a variety of sources. The number of police officers does seem to have been cut back in 2021, but not because of George Floyd. It was due instead to budget tightening as a response to the fiscal squeeze of the pandemic. The feds stepped in shortly after that with assistance to local governments, and police department staffing rebounded in 2022.
As for crime, we have a pretty good idea of what happened over the past couple of years: homicides went up and nearly everything else went down a bit. The total number of incidents continued its long-term decline.
Bottom line: Crime has plummeted since 1990 but policing hasn't. The number of police officers per crime has more than doubled over the past 30 years.
The Wall Street Journal has a rather remarkable story this weekend about CGT, the French union that represents workers in the power industry. Apparently they've taken to cutting off electricity to specific individuals as a protest against proposals to pare back the French pension system. The most curious thing about this is that everyone seems to be taking it in stride. The French government is said to be "outraged," but apparently is doing nothing more than suggesting CGT might face legal sanctions.
This got me curious about Emmanuel Macron's pension proposals, which eventually led me to this:
Some of the proposed measures, such as beefing up minimum pensions and merging France’s dozens of different retirement schemes, go down well with many people. But the government is also planning to gradually increase the minimum retirement age for most people from 62 to 64 by 2030, a move that has infuriated trade unions and the left as it would disproportionately hit low-pay workers who didn’t get a higher education and entered the job market early in life.
This is true, and it's true everywhere: High-income workers work fewer years and live a lot longer than low-income workers. Here's what that looks like for the US:
If you have 27 years of life left at age 50, you have about 15 years of life left at age 62. Cutting that by two years hurts a lot more than if you have 28 years left, as the rich do.
Here's the life expectancy differential internationally:
It surprises me that this isn't more well known. And there are ways to address it. Instead of using a retirement age, for example, you could base pensions on number of years worked. As illustration, consider this simplified scheme:
So if you start work at age 18, you'll get your pension at age 63. If you go to college and start work at 22, you'll get your pension at age 67. The size of your pension will still depend (partly) on how much you contributed to the system in your working years.
This doesn't eliminate the life expectancy gap, but it makes pensions a little fairer. There are other ways to do this, and other details to consider, but my point here is that it's not impossible to take this into consideration.
Dana Milbank summarizes the state of Republican budget negotiations:
House Republicans are saying they’re willing to risk default — an economic disaster — unless Biden agrees to cuts. But they won’t specify which cuts they want; Biden will just have to guess. “I want to look the president in the eye and tell me there’s not one dollar of wasteful spending in government,” McCarthy said, in his inimitable syntax.
I think we've seen this movie enough times to know exactly what they want to cut:
Beyond this they're likely to target a few programs related to climate change, wokeness, oil drilling, and anything else they can dig up that appeals to the MAGA crowd. It won't amount to much, though.
Bottom line: I guess we can keep playing this game where we pretend we don't know what Republicans want even though we all know it perfectly well. But why?
The Washington Examiner does a little examining today:
The salary for Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has nearly doubled during her six-year tenure on the job. McDaniel, who was elected as chairwoman in 2017, was paid $122,582 in her first year but made $358,431 from January 2022 through November 2022, according to Federal Election Commission data.
Hmmm. That looks like "nearly tripled," not "nearly doubled." But wait! First we have to extrapolate her 2022 salary for a full 12 months, which brings it to $390,000. That's more than tripled.
But wait again! In fairness, we have to adjust this for inflation, as we do with everything else. That brings her salary growth from $150,000 to $390,000 which is 2.6x.
That's pretty nice for six years, especially given her record. She was hired in 2017, and in 2018 Republicans got crushed in the midterm election. In 2020 Republicans lost the White House and both houses of Congress. In 2022, which should have been a "red wave" year, Republicans lost a seat in the Senate and eked out only a bare win in the House.
And yet, she was elected to a fourth term today. What's the deal here? Does McDaniel have dirt on everyone in the party? Is she the most prolific fundraiser ever? Is RNC chair an impossible job that no one else wants?
I am mystified.
Yesterday was a fine day with some Santa Ana winds blowing, which had the cats acting kind of squirrelly. Hilbert went out to the front yard and took possession of the sunny rock—his by right as king of the garden—and then Charlie decided to check out the rock too. Naturally he did this by sticking his nose up Hilbert's butt, which produced one very startled cat.
For the sake of completeness, here's the consumer spending data from today's PCE report:
Spending was down 3.4% compared to November (note that this is seasonally adjusted, so it accounts for higher average holiday spending).
Is this a sign of economic slowdown? Maybe. On the other hand, spending is still above the pre-pandemic trendline, and there was never any special reason to think this should continue forever. As excess savings continue to drain out of bank accounts, spending is likely to revert back to trend. This is especially true since income has already reverted to trend—and then some:
Spending has to catch up to earnings one of these days. I'm frankly surprised it's held out this long.