Kevin Drum

From National Review's Jim Geraghty:

Apparently, the leadership of the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work decided to “remove the term ‘field’ from our curriculum and practice and replace it with ‘practicum,’” declaring, “this change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that would be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language.”

....Talk about a policy that is out in left fie-, er, I mean, out in left practicum....But maybe decisions like this are necessary so that all students have a level playing fie-, er, practicum.

Yeah yeah. But I can hardly blame Geraghty for his little joke. He couldn't have written it if we weren't doing stupid stuff like deciding that "phrases such as going into the field or field work may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."

If field has painful "connotations" for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers, then so do:

• cotton
• pick
• spade
• passage
• hoe
• black
• lash
• plantation
• crop
• exploit
• traffic
• etc. etc. etc.

This list could go on forever. But guess what? We're not the only ones who do this. Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, has renamed the Committee on Education and Labor to the Committee on Education and the Workforce:

Why does that matter?

“Labor” is an antiquated term that excludes individuals who contribute to the American workforce but aren’t classified as conventional employees. “Labor” also carries a negative connotation that ignores the dignity of work; the term is something out of a Marxist textbook that fails to capture the accomplishments of the full spectrum of the American workforce.

....Language matters. Using outdated terms like “labor” creates an overt bias towards union bosses while widening fissures created by Big Labor between workers and employers.

There are those connotations again! Foxx must have lab-, er, thought hard to come up with this. But I don't have time to belab-, er, make a big thing of it right now. A friend just called and needs a ride to the hospital. She was watching Love's Lab-, er, Efforts Lost when she suddenly started lab-, er, having contractions.

I wish we could knock this off. There are a small number of words that really ought to be either avoided or banned altogether in polite society. But it's hard to make the case when we've already made laughingstocks of ourselves by pretending that words like field and labor are insults to various categories of people. Can we please get hold of ourselves?

From Speaker Kevin McCarthy, reminded that serial liar George Santos fabricated big chunks of his resume:

So did a lot of people here in the Senate.

Do tell! Let's name names, please.

This is a nice, shaggy horse in Modjeska Canyon lit by the late afternoon sun. I have no idea what kind of horse this is, or if there's anything special about it. But it's a pretty critter.

A new paper in Nature claims that "disruptive" discoveries in science have been on a downward trend over the past few decades. The authors use a measure of disruptiveness that basically measures whether anyone cares about previous work once the disruptive paper has been published:

The intuition is that if a paper or patent is disruptive, the subsequent work that cites it is less likely to also cite its predecessors; for future researchers, the ideas that went into its production are less relevant. If a paper or patent is consolidating, subsequent work that cites it is also more likely to cite its predecessors; for future researchers, the knowledge upon which the work builds is still (and perhaps more) relevant.

I'm . . . not so sure about this. All the various papers and patents that went into CRISPR, for example, may have been ho-hum, but CRISPR itself is pretty disruptive. You could say the same thing about the internet, cell phones, and GPS. The increasing complexity of the world means that it takes a lot of small pieces to construct a single disruptive discovery.

But there's another thing as well: A very few discoveries in human history might be called super-disruptive: discoveries so big that for many years they enable a follow-on surge of ordinarily disruptive discoveries. Here's a list:

Don't take the details too seriously here, but this table lists most of the consensus super-technologies and a few of the follow-on technologies they enabled. After the electric grid was invented, for example, households got air conditioning, refrigerators, TVs, microwaves, stereo systems, dishwashers, electric lighting, washers and dryers, and a vast array of other electrical gadgets.

The discovery of these super-technologies got closer and closer together all the way through 1950, but now progress seems to have stalled. This is because we're still living in the Computer Age, which our timeline suggests should have lasted about 50 years before giving way to a new super technology. That hasn't happened, which means we're still living on the dregs of an era that's largely played out.

But why hasn't a new super-technology been discovered yet? Because the next super-technology is artificial intelligence, and it turns out that it's really, really hard, even compared to previous gut busters. So we're piddling along with routine improvements and ordinary new inventions while we wait for AI to come along. When that happens, we'll have yet another explosion of innovation.

If it's inflation day, it's also earnings day. Average weekly earnings were down -18 cents from November, which comes to +71 cents after adjusting for (negative!) inflation:

Unfortunately, this is good news. Weak wage growth might be bad for workers, but it's good for inflation. Along with the great CPI numbers, this should go a long way toward convincing the Fed to ease up on the rate hikes.

It's worth noting that real wages have gone up 18.22% since the start of 2019 while inflation has gone up 18.08%. That's a whopping increase of 0.14% above inflation over the course of four years.

Put another way, real workers' wages have gained 35 cents per year since 2019, rising from $1124 to $1125. Now please tell me more about how essential it is to rein in spiraling wages.

I've got some good news and some bad news for December inflation:

The good news is that CPI inflation was negative in December. Prices were down 0.9% from their level in November.

Sadly, the core CPI went up a little bit and now stands at 3.7% on an annualized basis. This is still not a terrible reading, but it's up from 2.4% in November.

(Using the more conventional year-over-year figures, headline CPI in December was 6.5% and core CPI was 5.7%. Both were down from November.)

As usual, don't pay too much attention to individual monthly numbers, whether they're favorable or not. However, it's worth noting that the trendline for headline CPI stands at 0.7%, which is obviously a great number. Maybe too great, even. Keep in mind that 2% is the official goal.

Marc Thiessen today:

If Trump’s classified document mishandling was ‘irresponsible,’ so is Biden’s

Nice try, Marc, but no one has ever cared very much if a few classified documents were accidentally taken from the White House when a president (or vice president) moved. Sure, we'd all prefer they be more careful, but it's not that big a deal for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

What is a big deal is deliberately trying to hide the documents and then persistently obstructing efforts to retrieve them. That's what the Justice Department cares about. Trump did it. Biden didn't.

The end.

I suppose it's pointless to keep repeating this since no one ever listens, but can we please stop this nonsense?

The Fed May Finally Be Winning the War on Inflation. But at What Cost?

[Neel] Kashkari insists...taming inflation must be the priority. “The sooner we take the medicine,” he says, “the less painful it will be.”

The medicine appears to be working — inflation is moderating, and some economists think that we have seen the worst of it.

The Fed is not winning anything and the patient hasn't been given any medicine yet. Nothing that's happened in the past year is related to Fed activity in any way. I assume that even the hard core forward guidance folks agree that six or seven months is far too short a time for the Fed's interest rate hikes to have affected the economy.

The Fed's war on inflation begins this summer, when its interest rate hikes and its public statements start to affect inflation. If inflation goes up over the next few months and then declines in the summer, the Fed will have proven itself farsighted. If inflation keeps going down and then the economy crashes midway through the year, the Fed will have proven itself about as competent as a Russian general. Wait and see.

Moonrise, Indio, California.

The Russian army in Ukraine is changing command again. They are now on their third leader:

• February, 2022: Army General Aleksandr Dvornikov, the "Butcher of Syria," leads the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• October 2022: General of the Army Sergey Surovikin, aka "General Armageddon," replaces Dvornikov.
• January 2023: General of the Army Valery Gerasimov, also Chief of the General Staff and Hero of the Russian Federation, replaces Surovkin.

Dvornikov lasted eight months but Surovikin lasted only three. Why? The New York Times offers an opinion:

“They have taken someone who is competent and replaced him with someone who is incompetent, but who has been there a long time and who has shown that he is loyal,” said Dara Massicot, senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation in Washington. “Whatever is happening in Moscow, it is out of touch with what is happening on the ground in Ukraine.”

Putin keeps going up the chain of command for new generals. But I don't think there are too many more to go before he's leading the army himself.