But wait! There were a lot more people flying in 2022 than in 2021. Let's look at firearm confiscations per passenger:
So 2022 wasn't really a record, just an increase due to more people flying. In fact, the only interesting thing about this chart is the enormous uptick following the start of the pandemic in 2020.
At first you might think 2020 is a special case because air traffic plunged that year. But the firearm confiscation rate stayed high in 2021 and then dropped only a little bit in 2022.
You know what this reminds me of? Murder rates:
The only thing these two trendlines have in common is guns. Here's the number of firearm background checks conducted each year. It's generally considered a good proxy for the number of firearms sold:
Gun sales rose sharply in 2020. The murder rate rose sharply in 2020. TSA gun confiscations rose sharply in 2020. What other gun-related statistics might follow the same pattern?
Check out the smirk on this kid with his behind-the-back save in a ping pong game with his father. This picture was taken at a municipal ping pong table alongside the Saint-Martin Canal in Paris.
The congressional investigation of the January 6 insurrection is now over, and Republicans are obviously uninterested in continuing it. But the Washington Post reports that committee staffers collected loads of evidence about social media that never made it into the final report and is now hidden from public view:
The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee.... Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals.
....“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”
This matches pretty much all the public evidence we have about conservative dominance of social media, including Twitter. And there's this:
Some of what investigators uncovered in their interviews with employees of the platforms contradicts Republican claims that tech companies displayed a liberal bias in their moderation decisions....Twitter employees, they testified, could not even view the former president’s tweets in one of their key content moderation tools. “ … Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” said one former employee, who testified to the committee under the pseudonym J. Johnson.
I assume this was leaked to the Post by a staffer who would like to see their 122-page memo released to the public. That's obviously not going to happen as long as Republicans control the House, but it doesn't mean that it can't be leaked by someone who has a copy.
Maybe they'll leak it to me! I could become famous.
Alex Tabarrok and Robert Tucker Omberg have published a new paper which confirms a thought that's been rattling around in my head for a while. The thought is this: aside from vaccines, pretty much nothing has much effect on the spread of COVID-19.
As usual, I'll lead with a couple of charts. The first one measures excess deaths as a function of the quality of a country's health care system:
There should be a downward slope to the regression line, showing that better health care systems lead to fewer deaths. However, there isn't even a modest downward slope. There's a tiny upward slope. Richer, more competent countries had more excess deaths than poorer countries.
(Note that excess deaths is used here rather than reported COVID-19 deaths. This is because reported deaths are unreliable, especially in poorer countries. Excess deaths are easier to measure and more reliable.)
And now here's another chart:
These charts divide countries into four buckets by their level of preparedness for a pandemic, with the red line indicating the most prepared countries. Among all countries, the red line shows nothing special. When you zoom in on just rich countries, those represented by the red line did do better than the others—but not by an awful lot and mostly in the vaccine distribution year of 2021.
Nor did anything else studied by the authors make much difference:
Our primary finding is that almost no form of pandemic preparedness helped to ameliorate or shorten the pandemic. Compared to other countries, the United States did not perform poorly because of cultural values such as individualism, collectivism, selfishness, or lack of trust. General state capacity, as opposed to specific pandemic investments, is one of the few factors which appears to improve pandemic performance.
In other words, what's important is not so much preparedness as the willingness to take quick action. That willingness is found mostly in countries that have experienced a recent pandemic and are therefore on alert for a new one.
The authors draw two lessons from all this. First, instead of producing massive planning documents, which mostly fail, we should increase our use of everyday procedures such as routine genomic sequencing and monitoring of sewage discharge. These can give us early warning of a new virus. Second, we should focus our energies on anything that might speed up the development and deployment of vaccines. This is, by a long margin, the most effective way to fight a new pandemic virus.
My take on this is that it by no means tells us to give up and do nothing except develop vaccines. The world didn't respond well to COVID-19, but that doesn't mean we can never respond well to a pandemic. I have a dim view of human nature, but not that dim.
That said, the reason this has all been rolling around in my head is because of a single observation: Although some countries initially did better than others, eventually everyone had to relax. When that happens, you get your turn in the barrel. Here are death rates through the middle of 2021, before vaccines started to overwhelm other factors:
Southeast Asian countries did well because they were still paranoid from the SARS epidemic of a few years ago. Nordic countries did well for some mysterious reason that I don't think we yet understand.
Among other rich countries, there's a (very) rough division between large and small: Large countries generally had higher death rates than small countries. I can think of lots of reasons this could be true, and you should feel free to take a crack at it too. However, as far as I know there's no evidence for anything in particular.
POSTSCRIPT: This is a preliminary study and shouldn't be taken as the final word on anything. Also, like me, the authors might be biased in favor of the results they found. Take this as an opening salvo, but nothing more for now.
I'm probably going to regret this, but L'Affair Bostrom has intrigued me. Here's the background.
Nick Bostrom is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University who did something unfortunate 26 years ago: he engaged in an online conversation with a bunch of other 23-year-olds on an email listserv. The topic was communication styles, and Bostrom averred that he liked blunt talk. Unfortunately, the example he came up with was . . .
Blacks are more stupid than whites
. . . as an alternative to:
On average, Black people score lower on standardized IQ tests than white people.
In the email, he followed this up with a complaint that the blunt version of the statement strikes most people as no more than:
I hate those bloody n-----s!!!!
So far there's no controversy. Everyone, including Bostrom, agrees that this was idiotic, offensive, and repulsive. Bostrom apologized for it within 24 hours of writing it, and there it would have lain for the next 26 years, untouched and unknown, except for one thing: Bostrom apparently caught wind that someone was trawling through the old archives of the listserv looking for offensive stuff to use in "smear campaigns." Instead of waiting for this to happen, he posted a preemptive apology a week ago.
This blew up a corner of the internet because the apology—as usual—was deemed insufficient and insensitive. Here it is:
I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
What are my actual views? I do think that provocative communication styles have a place—but not like this! I also think that it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity. This is a huge moral travesty that we should not paper over or downplay. Much of my personal charitable giving over the years has gone to fighting exactly this problem: I’ve given many thousands of pounds to organizations including to the SCI Foundation, GiveDirectly, the Black Health Alliance, the Iodine Global Network, BasicNeeds, and the Christian Blind Mission.
Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question. I would leave to others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role
Peter Wildeford explains why he was offended:
Bostrom’s apology was absolutely idiotically executed and showed a stellar amount of indifference to the harm that his original email and expressed views caused.
But this isn't true. Bostrom's original email caused almost no harm and would have continued to cause no harm except that someone apparently planned to dredge it up and attack Bostrom with it. This is the person who caused harm.
What else? Other commenters have suggested that the apology was "defensive"; that it spent too little time apologizing; that it was tone deaf; that it didn't offer to make amends; and that it showed a lack of empathy toward the people Bostrom is apologizing to. Wildeford himself is upset at Bostrom's "smug and arrogant social ineptitude and flagrant dismissal of this incident."
Matt Yglesias takes a different view: Since Bostrom's original email recommended that offensive views should be dressed up for public consumption, maybe that's all he's doing here. "Under that circumstance, you face an unusually high bar if you want to genuinely persuade people that you have genuinely changed your mind....To my eye the 'apology' totally failed to meet that bar."
I don't really buy any of this. Bostrom has been a highly public and widely published figure for the past 26 years, and I don't know how a bar can be any higher. If he's done nothing in 26 years to suggest he has racist views, either he's not a racist or else he's a liar who could give George Santos a run for his money.
Nor do I really buy all the tonal criticisms. No apology has to be perfect, and the intent of Bostrom's seems fairly clear. We should do our best to give apologies a fair reading, not an obviously hostile one.
But then there's one more weird thing: After the excerpt I cited above, Bostrom abruptly veers into a short discussion of eugenics. Why? Everyone seems to be assuming that it demonstrates a deep well of racial obsession that bubbles up in Bostrom's brain constantly, which he doesn't have the self-control to shut up about. But I don't think that's right. Bostrom is deeply involved in the bioenhancement movement—which some people associate with eugenics—so he probably figured he needed to address it since it was certain to come up. Unfortunately, he puts it this way:
Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood.
This is pretty obviously open to mockery, and he really should have had the smarts to choose different wording. The point he wants to make is that in "contemporary academic bioethics" the word eugenics is sometimes used in the sense that parents should have access to genetic screening and, presumably, the choice to enhance their children if they wish to do so. Bostrom apparently (?) supports this, and wants to make sure that if anyone suggests he's ever written something that "endorses eugenics," this is all he was referring to.
My view is that the real villain of this episode is the person who was planning to attack Bostrom by dredging up this old email (assuming that such a person actually exists). Beyond that, I think that a fair reading of the apology convicts Bostrom, at most, of some awkward writing, but no more.
Finally, there's this: I have thought for some time that the art of apologizing has gone off the rails. In social media land, it's virtually impossible to offer an apology that doesn't attract mountains of criticism. For one reason or another, apologies are never good enough—it's a "non-apology apology"; you can't unring that bell; it showed too little appreciation of the deep harm that was caused; you need deeds, not just words; etc.—and this is so no matter how they're phrased or what they're about.
I'd just as soon not add to this. Let's save the pile-ons for genuinely insincere or tone-deaf apologies.
A reader asked me today to explain my analogy of inflation to the law of gravity. It's simple. Here's a picture of an airplane. Lift is providing an upward acceleration of 2 meters/sec², so everything is hunky dory.
But wait. We need to adjust for the downward force of gravity:
Once we've done that, the real acceleration of the airplane is 7.8 meters/sec² straight down.
There are occasions when you don't care about gravity and you only want to know about lift—for example, if you're testing a model in a wind tunnel. But in nearly all real-world applications, you need to adjust prices for inflation and you need to adjust the aerodynamic lift of an airplane for gravity. If you don't, your view of reality is faulty and you're going to crash and burn.
Shopper Rebellion Against Higher Prices Helps Slow Inflation
Indeed? Let's investigate how this rebellion against inflation is manifesting itself:
Conagra Brands Inc., which makes Hunt’s ketchup and Slim Jim meat sticks, raised prices 17% in its latest quarter, on top of two previous quarters, when it increased prices more than 10% [for a total of 27% over two years].
The company said it is done boosting prices for now. Conagra’s sales volumes fell 8.4% for the quarter ended Nov. 27, which the company attributed in part to shoppers recoiling from the price increases.
So this is not just about inflation, which has raised food prices 19% over the past two years. It's also due to the fact that Conagra decided to tack on an extra 8% just for the hell of it. And sales volume fell! Imagine that. It's exactly what they taught us in Econ 101.
A recent study provides more detail:
The study, by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, found that higher markups—the gap between what a firm charges and what it costs to produce an item—were a major driver of inflation in 2021.
In plainer terms, companies decided to use inflation as an excuse to boost their gross profit margins just because they could—or thought they could, anyway. But they sure didn't do the same thing with wages:
Since the start of 2021, weekly wages for food manufacturing workers have grown more slowly than inflation. In real terms, the folks who make Slim Jim meat sticks are earning about 5% less than they did two years ago.
So prices are up 8% and wages are down 5%. That should make Wall Street happy, but it's understandably worth a bit of rebellion for the rest of us.
Rain, rain, rain. We'll have more water in April when the snowpack melts, but our streams and rivers and flood channels are already filling up (temporarily) from our recent bomb cyclones and atmospheric rivers. This particular one is a stream that flows down alongside Mt. Baldy Road. Further up the mountain there's another picturesque bunch of rocks for the stream to flow over, but it was getting near sunset and I only had time for one. So this was it.
I don't get it. Why would you deliberately put up a chart that ignores inflation? It's like ignoring the law of gravity. "If you don't count the effect of gravity, our plane is ascending nicely. Oops."
Here is the 20-year total return for a 60-40 fund based on the numbers in the chart above:
It looks good! Until you account for inflation, that is. Once you do that it's never more than barely above an S&P index fund, and mostly well below it.
For anyone: Quote Martin Luther King Jr. so you can acknowledge MLK Day without doing any real work.
Repeat his belief that Chicago was worse than the South.
Print an entire speech/work. "Birmingham Jail" and "I Have a Dream" are the favorites, but less prominent speeches/works can show sophistication. The Riverside Church speech is a good one.
For liberals: Point out ways that MLK was a full-blown economic revolutionary, not just a cuddly, nonviolent civil rights leader.
Make your audience go hmmm by declaring that dissent is the real patriotism.
For conservatives: Point out that MLK would have been a conservative today.
Continue to oppose any legislation that helps Black people and assert that MLK would have agreed.
For the ambitious: Write a couple thousand words comparing Ukraine to the civil rights movement, with Volodymyr Zelensky cast as a modern-day MLK.
For the visually minded: Post a photograph of some kind.
So 2022 wasn't really a record, just an increase due to more people flying. In fact, the only interesting thing about this chart is the enormous uptick following the start of the pandemic in 2020.
The only thing these two trendlines have in common is guns. Here's the number of firearm background checks conducted each year. It's generally considered a good proxy for the number of firearms sold:
Gun sales rose sharply in 2020. The murder rate rose sharply in 2020. TSA gun confiscations rose sharply in 2020. What other gun-related statistics might follow the same pattern?
